LYNN GROW Reviews
Shawl from Kashmir and Other Stories by Manuel A. Viray
(New Day, Quezon City, 1992)
Manuel Abalos Viray is one of the most easily undervalued first-ranking literary figure in the history of Filipino literature in English. This is not due to any failure of judgment on the part of critics or lapse in taste on the part of readers. It is at least partly the result of his own reticence, as I pointed out long ago in conjunction with his poetry.1 Viray's greatness as a literary critic has been obscured not only by his reticence, but also by the fugitive nature of the publications in which his essays appeared.2
Viray's short stories have also received very little analytical attention. Besides the fact that Viray used pseudonyms for some original periodical publications, his short stories were not assembled into book form until they appeared in Solidarity, September and December 1967. The book publication of his sole collection, Shawl from Kashmir and Other Stories (Quezon City: New Day) was released only in 1992. These stories are of three sorts: The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines from 1941 to 1945, which Viray lived through, stories of human interaction during peacetime, and, bookending the collection, “Shawl from Kashmir” and “First in Haldama,” both based on the life of Christ.
The Occupation stories are among the best written about an era that most people would prefer to forget. “Broken Glass,” “Dark Eyes,” “Verdict,” “Lapse,” and “The Beleaguered” are not stories of adventure, heroism, or cowardice; for the most part they depict deprivation, not brutality. Anyone expecting something like the John Wayne movie Back to Bataan (1945) will be disappointed.3
Instead, Viray's stories depict the nuances of human life, details of the environment, both physical and emotional, humdrum aspects of daily routines of ordinary people, and glimpses of natural beauty.4
“Broken Glass,” set partially in 1941, partially in 1943, and partially in 1944, is the most complex and intricately interwoven of these tales. Movement backward and forward in time is signaled by events and characters focused on at any given interval, in keeping with the atmosphere immediately before the Occupation and during the Occupation: “An oppressive element hung in the air, reducing the regularity of mortal breath. Everything appeared tentative, terribly naked.”(23) The story's locale is the common denominator. An upscale haberdashery with a soda fountain before the war, it morphed during the war into the boisterous, even crass, cafe' Asaki.5 The haberdashery/cafe´ emblem represents the range of human presence as well. One waitress, politely fending off the unwanted attempted familiarity of a Japanese officer, is Marta, “an attractive figure.... The curly, brownish ends of hair, the sloping curve of the neck, the tapering torso ending at the young hips....”(20). In contrast is the waitress taking the order of the protagonist Tonio: “The plucked eyebrows, the shiny nose, the red lips, the sagging breasts, the large hips, and the tight belt looked garish and cheap.”(20) But even Marta is the worse for wear in the dreary and worrisome wartime Manila milieu: “The fine forehead, the clear eyebrows, the slightly tilted nose, the full lips appearing a little beaten by weather and worry, the surprising body draped by the regulation uniform of the Asaki Café.”(21) The contrasting though not offsetting factor to the degraded, drunken Japanese officers is Tom Reeves, the fresh-faced U.S. Army Air Corps lieutenant with “blue eyes twinkling”(25), whom Tonio meets in December 1941, and who asserts that “We go to war because we have to, even if we know the consequences. They say it is our duty”(25-26). This accords with Tonio's beliefs about “... the brutality of history, the sending of young men to fight wars in countries not their own”(25) and his interpretation of the broken drink glass “symbolizing the brittle quality of life, easily fragmented because of man's greed and lust for dominance.”(27) Yet this apparently sensitive, thoughtful man in 1943 “followed the lurching drunks [the two Japanese officers] out of the cafe´: Tonio, a cool and careful killer. Tonio. Tonio.”(27). The repeated noun of direct address is a lament, a cri de coeur, not an approbation. This scene dramatizes that the war's human destruction cannot be measured by its physical devastation, such as the loss, briefly mentioned here, of virtually all U.S. aircraft at Paraňaque by 200 Japanese aircraft that arrived undetected on December 8th , 1945. The raid was so successful that on December 26th , General Douglas MacArthur was forced to declare Manila an open city, not liberated until February 3rd, 1945. “Broken Glass” does not tell us the fate of Tom Reeves after he reported back to his base for duty, but obviously it was tragic.
The title of the next story in Shawl from Kashmir, “Dark Eyes,” refers concretely to the now fatherless waif dubbed “Dark Eyes” by the character Jimmy Osmundo, whose father had been taken away and murdered as a collaborator by the underground, exemplifying the moral darkness imposed on the Manila population by the Occupation. It is a darkness more extensive than that of the individuals in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902). The first-person narrative stance brings readers into the darkness, intensifying its murk. The foreboding tone is set in the opening sentences: “...then the skies darkened.” (28) “I could see the air shift from a neutral dusty color to a bright ominous orange and the gusts of wind swirling the debris on Azcarraga Street. The orange hue changed into a haze of violet, and then an apocalyptic chill seemed to touch the city.” (28) The microcosm here mirrors the macrocosm: “...the war years, with their pallid, artificial light, the people walking like somnambulists...the harsh gutturals of the invaders, the gleaming bayonets of sentries at the foot of city bridges, the tense atmosphere of every man fearing another... the hate of the underground for their money-mad countrymen...” (30)
The narrator's own darkness comes to light when he enters Ping Li's store and has a gun jabbed on his spine. He is warned away from doing “anything you'll regret tonight,“ (31), which turns out to be aiding a good friend who has been taken away by the underground. The man's frantic wife Elvira implores him to intervene, but he knows that he can't, even though he is also a member of the underground; later he delivers bullets to the resistance fighters in Antipolo. Though Elvira's husband is brutally murdered, he obviously was a collaborator. Yet, oddly, the narrator asks himself, “Why should a Filipino kill another Filipino?” (33) The question has already been answered: for collaboration with the invaders. Still, the narrator, recounting these events four years after they happened , gives the now fatherless waif Jimmy, who has been reduced to beggary, a five-peso bill (a significant sum during the Occupation) so “I could feel the tumult of expiation welling in my eyes.” (35)
“Verdict” is another story based on Occupation collaboration. Justice Perfecto Montenegro renders a dissenting opinion that spares the life of a convicted Makapili,6 “the magic eye” in a refugee town in which the justice and his wife lived in 1944. In that town “everything was peaceful outwardly but ...one felt with intuitive sense sharp tension of fear, death, and apprehension.” (45) The intuition is confirmed: the collaborator fingers several men, including the justice's wife's brother. The men are killed. The justice's wife is, of course, distraught at what her husband has done, especially because he then lies to her, saying he did not realize that the collaborator in question had turned in her brother. But if the justice is committed to his own stated principle, “A man's death diminishes me,”7 the identity of the man sentenced to death should be immaterial.8 “Dark Eyes” and “The Verdict” constitute a colloquy about what circumstances, if any, warrant—or demand—taking a human life. In the former story, the man spirited away to be killed was guilty of collaboration in return for material gain, but the outcomes of his aid to the enemy are unspecified, and he is convicted by no constituted authority. If no one died because of his disloyalty, was it justified to not only put a bullet through his head but to cut out his tongue as well and throw his body into the river? In the latter story, the Makapili is convicted by a lawful tribunal and condemned to death by the other sitting justices of the case. Yet the Makapili, though now sentenced to life in prison, has singly and directly caused the deaths of three men. “The Verdict” ends appropriately with the dissenting justice “wearily” lying down on his bed and staring “into the alien darkness.” (51) His darkness is not the dark eyes of Jimmy the waif but instead his realization that his smug opinion about the death penalty is not as open and shut as he had thought.
“Lapse” is set in the immediate aftermath of the Occupation, more precisely than “The Verdict” is: “...[Allied] operations had now shifted to Okinawa and Japan.”(61) It had been only weeks earlier that the G I's were “consistently, impatiently shelling Intramuros.”(54) Thus, “the shelling that February [1945]”(67) had come back again in Magdalena's thoughts. In contrast to the temporal specificity is the open-endedness of the “lapse” meant by the story's title. It is more than the “time was lapsing” (64) towards death for Teresa, the protagonist's mother-in-law. It is more than the “lapse of his [Nazario's ] diminution ”(68), the diminution resulting from the hardships of the Occupation, including his loss of a job, a crumbling house, and bare minimum food. In the story's last sentence “a lapse in his judgment” runs through his mind. But what judgment this is we can only surmise. It could be his decision to collaborate with the Japanese invaders, which his former chief at the Ministry of Agriculture throws in his face when he re-applies for his pre-war position. Ironically, the chief also collaborated.
It is possible to see the “lapse” in the much more encompassing theological sense of Lapsarianism, although exactly who in the pre-war Philippines might have done what to bring on the Fall from Divine Grace is indeterminable. In any case, it was hardly comparable to Sodom and Gomorrah.9 A Christian context is, however, suggested by the names of the characters Nazario, Magdalena, Teresa and Maria10 and that “Shawl from Kashmir” and “First in Haldama” are respectively, the first and last stories in the collection. Yet, in the second paragraph, “Nazario Munzon realized that men are confined in a world of their own diminution and failures “(52), which makes even the Occupation sound more like a result of erring, inept, misguided human actions than Divine judgment visited on intentional, wicked wrongdoers. Nazario remembers his wife Maria with respect and affection: “Her gentleness had stemmed, he thought, more from an inherent awareness of good and evil, than from the long years of training she had spent in Hong Kong where she attended an exclusive school for girls.”(56) Flora Mortal has borne Nazario a child, only to find out that he has married someone else—Maria. When she sees him again, “he heard someone cry out his name in gladness and welcome. It was Flora.”(58) She doesn't want anything from him, but he gives money to Flora nonetheless. Now, just after the Occupation, when Nazario is jobless, Flora, without prodding, convinces Major Dent of the U.S. army to hire Nazario as his personnel assistant (60). Flora indeed has “her own peculiar brand of loneliness and kindness.”(59) Nazario's mother- in- law, Teresa, is at first infuriated with Nazario for accepting help from a “slut. Hers is tainted money.”(62) Yet she soon softens, remembering “how much more patient Zar [short for Nazario] had become... Sometimes he slyly sacrifices his own food.”(64) She goes on: “There are certain things that a man is supposed to do. And he does it out of generosity and kindness. This diminution, this disorder, this cruelty Zar did not help bring about... where would Magdalena and I be if it had not been for him?”(64)
Magdalena [called Dal for short] is also good-hearted. She feels about Nazario, “you are farthest from his heart and you concentrate your attention... on your ailing mother and his child, trying as much as possible to ease the pain, to help him ride over a panic, to smoothen a violent scene which catches him in its vortex.”(66) In less dramatic ways, Dal is also thoughtful about others. After Nazario has gone for his interview with Major Dent, she thinks “I should have darned his sock...”(67) From all of this, we may concur with the ex cathedra conclusion that “Most men are never able to impose any kind of surcease on regret, nor any kind of order on the instability of the world, nor can they undo what seems to be a blemish in their mortal hearts, a flaw in their will.” (64) But, we might add, some can.
The last of the Occupation stories is “The Beleaguered,” set in “the tenth month ofter Liberation.”(85) In spite of its ominous beginning, it is a story of hope, showing the resolute and unselfish possibilities of people in distress. As such, it is a very fitting end piece to the Occupation story sequence, although it is the least substantive of them. Adrian, the protagonist, is short of money because his employer, the Chronicle of Liberation, is late with two monthly payrolls. He attempts to borrow money from Guillermo, the godfather of Adriano's second son. Guillermo, a jitney driver, is not at home, so he asks Francisca, Guillermo's wife, for money, but she has none. He then visits his Tio [uncle] Ponso, whose wife brings him a coke, and his uncle gives him a bill and invites Adriano to bring his wife and family for a visit on Sunday. Adriano declines the invitation. The following day he boards a reconverted carrier and sees that Guillermo is driving. Guillermo's wife is acting as conductor because they can no longer afford to pay a conductor. Their son's left foot is in a plaster cast. The doctor suspects infantile paralysis, but the couple cannot afford to take the boy to the hospital. Adriano is chagrined that he had asked them for money and “thought how fiercely his friends were battling the subtle maneuvers that life was executing; that, unlike him, they had no interior hatred, no amoral verdicts on the behavior of their friends.”(91) He has realized that the resolution he had made in the hills of San Timoteo, to which he and his family had fled during the chaos of the shelling during the Liberation, never to be poor again, was “brief and brittle” (91)
Four stories in Shawl from Kashmir center around peacetime human interrelationships. “Portrait of a Great Man” is concerned with institutional bureaucracy and petty, selfish behavior. “Formation” is concerned with family dysfunction. “One Man's Death”11 and “To Prepare a Face”12 depict greed, infidelity, and hypocrisy. Together they dissect an array of day-to-day human foibles. “Portrait of a Great Man” is a title that leads us to expect a man of outstanding achievement and/or exemplary character, but we soon realize that he is “great” only in terms of his weight: “He heaved his heavy bulk from the front seat “ of his chauffeured car(36); he has a “pudgy hand.”(38) Dr. Rufino T. Ventenilla does have impressive academic credentials. He is an Escuela de Derecho [law school] graduate and holds from Oxford University a master's degree and a doctor's degree in jurisprudence. But his behavior is far less impressive. Although he remembers “the tyrannical, exciting lips of Lita [his querida], the fierce passionate hours at dawn,” (36) he can only remember two of the three grocery items Lita has asked him to buy. “For the life of him he could not recall” his personnel clerk's name either(37). even when he orders the man to requisition the items for his personal use, not for his office staff, from the Republic Rehabilitation Center. His office table is a mess, with records “scattered as far as the edge of the table.”(37) Probably none of these situations has been mitigated by his practice of opening his workday—at 8:00 a.m.—with a “thimbleful” of Schenley whiskey. (37). Not surprisingly, boot-licking favoritism abounds. A “thin, angular girl whom he had assigned to the research section...” (36) is “the protege of Assemblyman Juan Tuviera y Sibulsibula.”(37). Two other functionaries, Perez and Montalbo, over a restaurant lunch discuss the way the promotion ladder is handled in government service: “In this country... the ladder is incessantly pulled thither and yon by scheming politicians... the doctor should have acceded to Reyes' appointment. After all, he is the heir, though only a nephew of Secretary Reyes. The Secretary is the President's closest confidant. Besides, he controls government accounts.”(41) At the end of the story, Perez, who has succeeded Dr. Ventenilla as Deputy Commissioner, reveals his despicable character. He plays all the right cards politically, but when an underling, the personnel clerk, asks him to sign a voucher for a partial salary advance so that the clerk can at once take his seriously ill wife to the hospital, Perez responds “Don't bother me” and walks past him.(43)
“Formation” narrows the human interaction focus to one family, which is on the verge of becoming as deteriorated as its house, which has already “deformed” into “disrepair.” “… the warped paint, the unhinged window on the eastern side, the displaced flagstones, the rot and weeds creeping gradually... the cement driveway was now gone, broken, shattered, chipped in several places.” Even the weather is bleakly uninviting: “It was an unusually hot June day- unrelieved, windless, humid.”(92) The inside is in no better condition than the outside is: “She [Barbara Lys, the protagonist] had long stopped being appalled by the worn-out upholstery on the scarred sala set...the support of the coffee table was broken.” (93) “The stench from the pozo negro [cesspool or septic tank] was unbearable. The sunlight was distorted as it entered through the bent slats of the blinds. Half a dozen tiles had been loosened from the kitchen floor. Even the tiles were also loose in the terrace.”(94)
The dysfunction of the family in the house mirrors the state of the house. One subtle sign is the depersonalized identification of the Father, Mother and Grandfather by title only (in each case with a capitalized first letter, no less); their given names are not supplied. Far from subtly, Barbara presents Father “with his big mouth, irascibility, and dull business sense....[at an earlier time] he was spending his time and wasting his substance on the waitress working at their restaurant on Sampaloc Avenue.” (94) Mother “... believes only in the old-fashioned way of bringing up children. Spanking or pinching the ear.... she only looked forward to her mahjong13 and novenas-- making continuous weekly prayers to St. Pancratius14 and Our Mother of Perpetual Help.”(94) In fact, at least according to Barbara, “Everyone in the house was going to seed, except her and her family and Rick” [her younger sister]94). But even Rick is headed downhill: “Rick used to pay the maid and the gardener on time. Not anymore....lately, the gardener had complained about his late salary. Rick was splurging on clothes, nylons, bags, shoes.”(95-96) The maid needs her salary on time so she can send her sick mother some penicillin, but Rick says the maid will have to wait for two days. The third person narration sums it up: “This disregard for other people ran in both their veins.”(96) Barbara finally shows how true this summation is. Rick is pregnant, suffering from morning sickness: “she slobbered again, the movement of her entire body racked by her spasmodic convulsions.” Barbara's reaction is “Let her vomit again. Let her convulse. Let her retch in her misery.”(101) This story's title is only secondarily a reference to the “formation of rows of ivory”(98) in mahjong; it is about the self-formation of the human condition. The Occupation stories present life in survival mode from an external force, not what people have brought on themselves. “Portrait of a Great Man” is an insight into human selfishness and cupidity. But “Formation” depicts the epitome of self-wrought degradation and misery, repellant rather merely disgusting.
“One Man's Death” is a mordant, bitter counter to the theme of Donne's poem. The death of Adriano is viewed by every character except his wife as an enhancement, not a diminution, in “the bureaucratic struggle for power”(70). Marcos envisions supplanting Adriano as Deputy Commissioner. Del Mundo has the same aspiration. Estabillo is so shallow that at Adriano's funeral, he wonders whether there will be a game of mahjong. No wonder that, as the synesthetic description has it, “The night darkness was heavy in the air...” and, grimly enough, “the hanging odor of gladioli, azucena and camia [is] strangled in wreaths.”(70) Only the taxi driver whose vehicle has been rear-ended by a six-by-six, causing Adriano's death, turns up to offer condolences, not to seek political traction, and offers a ten-peso donation for the widow.15 He is blameless-- his taxi cab was stopped by a policeman, thus causing the fatal accident--yet he does this decent thing and thus serves as a foil for the more prosperous but callous characters. Adriano's widow only hopes Adriano now is at peace, though she has had to tolerate his “thrice-a-week escapades”(74) Yet when she applies for his life insurance benefits, she finds out that Adriano has changed his beneficiary from her to his concubine. In death as in life, sleaze is depicted as paramount, decency as tributary.
“To Prepare a Face” comes across as a very bland narrative because it is. It centers around the second-tier dissipators of post war-war Manila, the “wanna be's” of declassė. The protagonist, Patricia, with her eight-year-old daughter, Esperanza, goes to the Cafė Latino on Del Pilar street and meets a group of young men she knows. She is separated from her husband, only not divorced because divorce was not legal at that time. The third-person narrative explains that “yes, they had been married for ten years, but she could no longer bear Ernesto's nightly demands.”16 (78) This is hard to take at face value. Only after ten years of apparently nightly conjugal relations, she now finds the activity unbearable? Motherhood must not be the variable because, for eight of those ten years, their daughter Esperanza has been with them. Even the name Esperanza (Spanish for “hope” or “expectation”) makes this plot element borderline boffo. Patricia's explanation to Ernesto for their rift is so idealistic that it is beyond belief that it could possibly be what now makes what she has done on schedule for ten years unbearable: “We move in worlds so different. You have your friends in the commission and in the black market. I have mine, the seekers of truth, those who expose the activities of the renegades in society.” Ernesto's rejoinder is “...you don't mind sharing the money I make--even what I make on the [black] market.” (78) The mood of the five young men at the cafe is matter-of-fact, perfunctorily disapproving of the machinations of those who profit from illicit surplus goods disposal. Ernesto anticipates making a fortune by taking advantage of his insider information about the location of the new capital site by purchasing real estate parcels in the area. Patricia's even- keel presence in the face of these admissions of skullduggery is out of keeping with her stated reason for parting company with Ernesto.
Another discordant aspect of the story is the opening scene of the Black Nazarene17 celebration: “...Friday devotees... jostled their way under the tropical sun of mid-afternoon...”(76) Although this description localizes time (Good Friday), it doesn't either enrich or ironically counterpoint the thematic thread of the narrative. At the cafė a beggar does approach Patricia's table and extends his palm. One of the five young men, Tony, does give him a ten-centavo coin, but this only triggers an abstract question about whether the gulf between “glittering prosperity” and “extreme poverty” is the result of surplus goods mismanagement, a debate that could have occurred without the beggar's appearance or it being Good Friday.
The stories about the life of Christ begin with the title story of this collection, “Shawl from Kashmir,” which is masterful, far more than Viray's characterization of it as “a variation of the Nativity Scene”(9) would suggest. Actually, the Nativity is not part of the story's plot, which opens as the soldier Jarius 18 is dispatched by his commandant Roboam to intercept Mary and Joseph on their flight to Egypt to escape King Herod's order to bring the baby Jesus to him. In the meantime Roboam(16) goes off to his tryst with Salomė.19 Jarius' quest parallels the journey of the Magi (Melchor, Caspar, and Baltazar) who also had been instructed by Herod to bring the baby Jesus to him but instead detour back to their home countries. En route, Jarius sees a “caravan carrying its cargo of Corinthians who had just landed on the coast bringing hashish.” [marijuana]. (13) This occurrence juxtaposes travel for the wrong reason (drug smuggling) with travel for the right reason (paying homage to Jesus). The murdering Corinthians, who have ambushed two of Jarius' comrades, also directly contrast with the next threesome he meets immediately afterward: Joseph with his “compassionate blue eyes”; Mary, with the smooth face, gentle eyes, and “delicately shaped lips”(14); baby Emmanuel 20 with his “look of pure and untainted innocence.” (16). Jarius has proved his human worth by eschewing the concupiscence of Roboam, the blandishment of Herod (who has promised him a shawl from Kashmir for his wife as a reward for bringing the baby Jesus to him), and the brutality of the Corinthian smugglers. Years later Jarius, his wife Miriam,21 and his son Mio 22 a trio paralleling both the three Magi and Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, travel to Judea to again see Jesus, now a grown man. To Jarius' surprise, Jesus has been expecting him, noting that he was “the guard at Gaza” and that his wife is not wearing the shawl from Kasmir, details that, as an ordinary human infant at the time, he could not possibly have recalled. The story closes with Jesus saying “I was thinking of thee”(18) which intimates that Jarius is important to Jesus, as Jesus is to Jarius. Jesus is indeed Emmanuel.
The artistic features, not just the storyline, are what make this story exquisite, however. Even the title “Shawl from Kashmir” is soft and smooth, redolent of the cashmere goat wool made from the Himalayan animals in Tibet and the Kashmir region of India, the audible but invisible homonym “Kashmir”/ “Cashmere” carefully designed. Visual imagery is used more extensively than tactility is. It is the touch of the artist who could stand on the second-floor balcony of the charity house in which he lived and see, across the street, “an impasto in green, ” two infants “hooded in green, snug inside green coverlets” in light green prams (7). In the story, Roboam awakens Jarius with the simile “...you sleep like a cedar from Lebanon.”(11) 23 A sentry is “reciting a litany of nature's green and dappled blessings,”(12) imagery enhanced by the personification “A moon untangles itself from a birch tree's foliage”(13) and the alliteration of “the motionless mimosa trees” and “the infrangible sand”(14). Soon the olfactory sense is invoked: “odors of myrrh and frankincense”,(15) and finally we get the synesthetic “coronal for Jarius' words.”(16) These devices and the smoothly flowing storyline produce pervasive calmness, a continuous undisturbed tranquility emanating from an understood, if unarticulated, assurance that, as in Browning's “Pippa Passes,” God's in this Heaven—and all's right in the world.”
In striking contrast are the shrill, strident fricatives of “First in Haldama,”24 which expresses anger and frustration, not hope, and is barren of the aesthetic beauty of “Shawl from Kasmir.” Unfortunately, the story is marred by a bombastic, improbably idealistic speech by Jarius, fortunately for him in his own home to only his wife and son:
Assassins. Unbelievers. They have done an unforgivable thing. Usurpation, indeed. They are the usurpers! Killing the finest man on earth, the fountainhead of faith, of truth and love, the apostle of kindness. Killers! Renegades! They are strangers to the muted cry of a suffering humanity, aliens to the unrevealed dreams of the meek and disinherited. They have cursed and fulminated against the gentle man of good will. They don't know how it is to be unselfish, to help the maimed, the leprous, the palsied, the diseased, the sick of soul and body. They don't know why he came to us...he came to crucify the sinners and the publicans, to scorn the raving mad, the potentates of power, the hot-tempered advocates of acquisitiveness, the princes of darkness. To banish graft and corruption in the military, to efface nepotism in the higher councils of Caesar's government, in the hierarchy of Herod! I could kill them, kill them! (105)
Even in a rage, for him to say that Christ came to crucify and to scorn and that he Jarius could kill the wrongdoers is a shocking self-condemnation and an even worse denigration of Jesus.
“First in Haldama ” also suffers from the anachronism “ One man's death diminishes me” (107), yet another Viray allusion to a line from a poem that would not be written for more than a millennium and a half after the time setting of the story.
“First in Haldama” does at least end with at least a measure of closure. In “Haldama, the field of blood, we're going to bury Judas... He will be the first to be interred there.” (108) Happily, the Viray oeuvre of outstanding works in poetry, short fiction, and literary criticism will not be interred with him; they will stand as touchstones, not tombstones, of 20th Century Filipino literature.
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Notes
1 “ Reticent Resolve: The Poetry of Manuel A. Viray. ” Ariel 18.4 (October 1987): 23-35. Rptd. In L.M. Grow, World Enough and Time: Epistemologies and Ontologies in Modern Philippine Poetry. Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 2000. 79-90.
2 See my “Philippine Poetry in the Formative Years.” Ariel 15.3 (July 1984): 81-98, especially note 28, pp. 97-98. Rptd. In World Enough and Time 20-39, note 26, pp. 36-37. As the listing in note 28 (note 26 in the reprint) shows, Viray was also a skilled anthologist. His output was less than that of Leopoldo Y. Yabes or more recently, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, but his choice of selections is impressive. A significant portion of his critical work is contained in his letters, especially those to Bienvenido N. Santos, Leonard Casper, and me. Late in his life, Viray sent me copies of his own letters, letters to him, and drafts of a few of his literary works for safekeeping and preservation. These manuscripts are now housed in the Banaan Museum in Lingayen, thanks to the interest and effort of Mr. Erwin S. Fernandez and Mrs. Maria Luisa Amor-Elduayan, Provincial Tourism and Cultural Affairs Officer. Relevant excerpts from these materials appear in L.M. Grow, The Epistolary Criticism of Manuel A. Viray: In Memoriam. Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 1998.
3Though a movie buff may well recall Casablanca (1942).
4 In their uniformly empirical character, they are the opposite side of the coin from Viray's poems. His poetry's focus is ontological, abstract, especially centered around elision. The stories are concrete, centered around the particulars of human behavior in stressful situations. How polar oppositional this bifurcation is becomes evident when we read tertium quid selections like two from British poet Eleanor Veness in The Next Review October/ November 2015: “I am Daedalus “ (pp. 25-27) and “Remains” (p. 29), whose controlling motif is subsidence.
5 The irony of the name is that in Japanese “Asaki” is a girl's name meaning, usually, “Morning Blossom” or “Morning Moon.” Depending on the Kanji used, it can have a variety of meanings related to nature.
6 Any collaborator during the Occupation of Manila who identified suspects for the Japanese military police. Officially Makapili was a group of militant Filipinos who fought for the Imperial Japanese Army. The group formed only near war's end on December 8, 1944. The informer system was called “zonification.”
7 The first sentence is derived from John Donne's poem “No Man Is an Island”(1624). “Any [my emphasis] man's death diminishes me” is a more emphatically inclusive wording. The literary allusion is a counterpart to the earlier reminiscence of the justice's wife, who had “an intuitive sense of sharp tensions of fear, death, and apprehension—a green thought in a green shade.”(45) This second allusion is to a couplet, lines 47-48, in Andrew Marvell's 1681 poem “The Garden”:
“Annihilating all that's made
to a green thought in a green shade.”
The point here and throughout the poem is that intellection can destroy the natural world, so, to most fully apprehend and appreciate it, one should withdraw into a garden. This notion has struck readers as everything from a “reductionist fantasy” to “a spiritual epiphany.” In between these two response poles lies the middle ground of U.S transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. He viewed philosophy as a way of life, not merely discourse about reflective thought, so he meditated about the concrete problems of life. He held that aesthetic responses to phenomena are ontologically significant.
8 A subtle atmospheric backgrounding of Mrs Montenegro's rumination is present in the rhapsodic descriptive passages interspersed into the story; e.g., “The amber afternoon glided away from the door ever so slowly and soon a twilight breeze rustled the curtains.” (45) “She remembered the town nestling in the intolerable green of the hills, the rift of soft morning sunlight slowly dissolving the filigree of blue mist floating and encircling the jutting hills like delicate threads...” (45-46) “...the stars came out glittering in the deep blue of the sky, a wide moveless arc clearly sweeping from one rim of the world to the other. A crescent moon shed its effulgent glow.” (48) “A faint bar of light slanted on the bed...”(49) “The opalescent bar of starlight lay on his bed again.” (51) These passages are quite compatible with Thoreau's outlook.
9 See Genesis 18:20 ff for mention of destruction of the sinful cities. Here and throughout I cite the King James Version of the Bible (Cleveland and New York: World, n.d. Orig pub. 1611). The Biblical accounts differ only in recency of wording, not in content, in the Jerusalem Bible Reader's Edition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966). The Douay-Rheims Bible New Testament (1582), though pre-dating the Protestant version, has the complication of being based on the Latin Vulgate text of 380 a.d. and thus rendering a translation of a translation. In the case of the Hebrew Bible, no Ur text has ever been found.
10 Nazario, from the Latin Nazarius, means “from Nazareth” and is often a name given to Christians to symbolize a connection to the Biblical city. Magdalena derives from the ancient Hebrew name Magdala meaning “tower” or “elevated.” Teresa may be from the Greek word Theros, meaning “summer” or it may be from Therizo, “to harvest.” She represents warmth, renewal, and vitality and, in Christianity, may refer to Saint Teresa of Avila. Maria, in the Bible, is Mary, the mother of Jesus.
11 This title is another allusion to Donne's “No Man Is an Island.” Here the death diminishes not just theoretically, as in the case of Justice Montenegro, or emotionally, as it does for Mrs Montenegro in “Verdict,” but materially as well.
12 This title alludes to T. S.Eliot's poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 26-27:
“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”
13 Usually a gambling game. In this respect she is a match for Father, who “...had always
aimed at what he referred to as the 'jackpot'. But thrice he had failed.” (94) Mother, who hosts the mahjong games, as Barbara points out, doesn't even take the customary “house cut” of the winnings. Barbara goes on to remind Mother that the guest mahjong players “take their merienda here—free.” The mother's weak response is “They bring us chickens, bananas, strawberries, sometimes.” [my emphasis] (95)
14 A Roman beheaded at age 14 in 304 a.d. for his conversion to Christianity. His name, of Greek derivation, means, in this story's context ironically, “all powerful.”
15 At the time, ten pesos was a substantial amount for the working class in Manila.
16 With an exuberant tone, this could be, be depending on what the “nightly demands” are, a basis for a Cialis or Viagra commercial, not a complaint.
17 A carved wooden statue of Jesus carrying the cross to the crucifixion. It is enshrined in the Minor Basilica and National Shrine of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo, Manila. Many impoverished followers relate their daily struggle to the Passion of Christ. Although over the years opinion has been divided about whether veneration of this figure constitutes idolatry, it is accepted in Catholicism and has been approved by three popes, including John Paul II.
18 The name is the Greek form of the Hebrew Jair, meaning “he shines,” “one giving light,” or “he enlightens.” The story of Jarius and his daughter is recounted in two books of the Bible. In Mark 4: 35-42 Jesus brings Jarius' daughter back to life; in Luke: 44-56 the daughter is presumed dead, but Jesus avers that she only “sleepeth” [today we might interpret this state as “comatose”]. Jesus restores her to consciousness, able to rise and walk.
19 Roboam, whose name means in Hebrew “he that opposes the people,” is identified in Matthew 1:7 as a son of Solomon. In 1 Kings14:23 he is said to have permitted idol worship and “Sodomites in the land.” Salomé Is a name derived from the Hebrew word “Shalom,” meaning “peace.” She was, according to Mark 15:40-41, a follower of Jesus present at the crucifixion, but it
seems implausible that this devotee could be the same person as she who purportedly danced for King Herod and demanded John the Baptist's head on a platter as her reward.
20 A Hebrew name meaning “God is with us.” In Isaiah 7:14 it is prophesied that a virgin will bear a son called Emmanuel; Matthew 1:20-23 applies this prophesy to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
21 The Old Testament form of “Mary” in the sense of “balanced,” not as the name can otherwise connote, “rebellious” or “bitter.” ”Independent” is the best derivative of these latter two possibilities. Taken together, the Biblical allusions are a testament to Viray's depth and breadth of knowledge about and understanding of the Scriptures.
22 “Mio” has no direct linkage to the Bible. In Spanish, it means “mine.” Since “Mio” is used as a girl's name in Japanese, it has no implications for the boy in this story.
23 “The Cedars of Lebanon,” with varying phraseology, appears many times in the Bible. The cedars were a source of wealth for Lebanon, especially for Tyre and Sidon. The wood was a prized building material. David used it for his palace, Solomon used it for the Temple in Jerusalem as well as for his own palace, and rulers of nearby countries to Israel sought it as well, partly because it was the most expensive wood at the time. Many contemporary readers recognize “the cedars of Lebanon,” here a simile and in “First in Haldama” (108) as an intensifier, by the French author Alphonse de Lamartine poem “The Cedars of Lebanon” (1833).
24 Viray characterized “First in Haldama” in his “Introduction” as “a version of the betrayal in Gethsemane ...” (19) Actually, this first-person story is about the aftermath of the betrayal.
*****
L. M. Grow is Emeritus Senior Professor of English, Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He holds a B.A. ( English and Philosophy), M.A. ( English), M.A. (Philosophy), and PhD. (English) degrees from the University of Southern California. He has published six scholarly books and more than sixty journal articles. His specialty is Filipino literature in English.
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