20040730
writers - cesar ruiz aquino
from checkmeta: the cesar ruiz aquino reader
The sequence was something like this:
I study at Silliman for one semester in 1962. The next semester I quit school and go to Manila for the first time, to attend a seminar under Leonard Casper, the American literary critic, at the Ateneo Graduate School on Padre Faura. [8] When the next school-year opens I am back in Zamboanga. I finish my A.B. at the Zamboanga AE College. Then I go back to Manila, go to the U.P. at Diliman for graduate work in Comparative Literature. I am twenty-one. I see James Dean for the first time at the Lyric Theater in Escolta. The movie is East of Eden and when the movie is over I want to bawl like a child inside the moviehouse’s comfort room.
I come home during the semesteral break and beg to be allowed to quit school for a while and stay home. My mother will hear nothing of it. I do not have the courage to tell her I am a delinquent, more exactly a truant, in school and I know the second semester will go absolutely the same way. So she wins, I go back to U.P. and after a year she loses, though I can hardly say I’ve won—I leave university with no units earned except in one subject under Mrs. Dolores Feria.
Now nothing can make me go back to school. My mother yields helplessly, as though I were ill. I am in fact completely bewildered, sort of knocked out on my feet. But I am back to my old habits in no time. I visit the public library in the mornings. From our house on Unreal Street, it is one short perpendicular street away—a small building from the American years. Its door faces north; one enters turning left, away from a now visible sea beyond the Fort and the acacia trees. In the afternoons I take to the streets. I browse in the two bookstores, Apostol & Sons and Golden Bell, very small but in the former I miraculously find a book each by Capote, Bellow, and Nabokov. One after another I buy all three. I run into old friends, chiefly Willy Arsena.
This goes on for months. In July, I join a radio station as casual announcer. I disc-jockey in the evenings. People wonder who the young man behind the voice is. At parties they are surprised to meet me. Naturally I am extremely good-looking on the radio, not to mention tall and dark. I become shyer and shyer and more and more conceited at the same time. They can’t make anything out of me in person. I am the ultimate in uncommunicativeness. But quite swaggering on the radio, and on the phone when the girls call up, who all flip over the voice. One can’t wait to meet me and comes to the station right after she calls. When she arrives, I put on a long-playing album and take her outside the booth, away from the view of the technician, and proceed to at least partially fulfill her fantasies before they completely deserted. In March of the following year, I transfer to another station where, in December, I get into a fight with a senior announcer, let go with a hail of blind blows one of which lands hard, sealing the end of our boxing match with a black-eye.
Also the end of 1966, the end of my job, the end of my adolescence.
The end of my life in Zamboanga.
[ webpage ]
[ inquirer ]
¶ 7/30/2004 04:38:00 PM
The sequence was something like this:
I study at Silliman for one semester in 1962. The next semester I quit school and go to Manila for the first time, to attend a seminar under Leonard Casper, the American literary critic, at the Ateneo Graduate School on Padre Faura. [8] When the next school-year opens I am back in Zamboanga. I finish my A.B. at the Zamboanga AE College. Then I go back to Manila, go to the U.P. at Diliman for graduate work in Comparative Literature. I am twenty-one. I see James Dean for the first time at the Lyric Theater in Escolta. The movie is East of Eden and when the movie is over I want to bawl like a child inside the moviehouse’s comfort room.
I come home during the semesteral break and beg to be allowed to quit school for a while and stay home. My mother will hear nothing of it. I do not have the courage to tell her I am a delinquent, more exactly a truant, in school and I know the second semester will go absolutely the same way. So she wins, I go back to U.P. and after a year she loses, though I can hardly say I’ve won—I leave university with no units earned except in one subject under Mrs. Dolores Feria.
Now nothing can make me go back to school. My mother yields helplessly, as though I were ill. I am in fact completely bewildered, sort of knocked out on my feet. But I am back to my old habits in no time. I visit the public library in the mornings. From our house on Unreal Street, it is one short perpendicular street away—a small building from the American years. Its door faces north; one enters turning left, away from a now visible sea beyond the Fort and the acacia trees. In the afternoons I take to the streets. I browse in the two bookstores, Apostol & Sons and Golden Bell, very small but in the former I miraculously find a book each by Capote, Bellow, and Nabokov. One after another I buy all three. I run into old friends, chiefly Willy Arsena.
This goes on for months. In July, I join a radio station as casual announcer. I disc-jockey in the evenings. People wonder who the young man behind the voice is. At parties they are surprised to meet me. Naturally I am extremely good-looking on the radio, not to mention tall and dark. I become shyer and shyer and more and more conceited at the same time. They can’t make anything out of me in person. I am the ultimate in uncommunicativeness. But quite swaggering on the radio, and on the phone when the girls call up, who all flip over the voice. One can’t wait to meet me and comes to the station right after she calls. When she arrives, I put on a long-playing album and take her outside the booth, away from the view of the technician, and proceed to at least partially fulfill her fantasies before they completely deserted. In March of the following year, I transfer to another station where, in December, I get into a fight with a senior announcer, let go with a hail of blind blows one of which lands hard, sealing the end of our boxing match with a black-eye.
Also the end of 1966, the end of my job, the end of my adolescence.
The end of my life in Zamboanga.
[ webpage ]
[ inquirer ]
¶ 7/30/2004 04:38:00 PM
