Free Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco

prehistoric
terra australis incognita
; he proceeded to their echidnas, platypuses, and other zoological oddities, then the creative urges of the larger animal world, epitomized by the phenomenon of cats and elephants painting; then he riffed on the pinnacle of sensuality in the softness of Bernini’s Baroque marbles, the impression of the rapist Pluto’s fingers on Persephone’s supple thighs, Daphne’s gradual then startling transformation into a laurel tree as you circle her fleeing Apollo; finally, Crispin grew agitated over José Honorato Lozano’s
Letras y Figuras
paintings, which, he said, ingeniously combined landscape, still life, typography, and thematic tableaux into an artistic concession to the vanities of nineteenth-century Manila socialites. All this over chipotle nachos before our cheese-burgers arrived.
    Crispin’s monologues attained velocity in that way. His Comp Lit lectures, with students spilling out the doorway, were legendary for their gee-whiz fervor, violent digressions, miraculous convergences. Yet he struck me as possessing the self-centeredness of the calcified lonesome. During our first casual conversations, he chose his words with caution. Only after a few meetings did his focus shift away from discussing himself. That’s not to say it moved to me. No. It bounded past, to another realm he found more familiar, the wondrous specifics of the great cosmologies. More than twice he jumped up to shift piles of books around, sending the topmost tumbling down, just to leaf to a spicy passage which he’drecite from memory anyway, with closed-eyed gusto. I had to strain to hear the incantations from Cid Hamete Benengeli, Julián Carax, John Shade, Randolph Henry Ash. Then he would sit in silence, soaking it up. Never did he ask how my weekend went. Rarely did he solicit my opinion, except perhaps to pass judgment on me.
    When Crispin went on and on, I would sometimes tune out, watching his hands gesticulate. Each was scarred bizarrely. The tissue, the size of a dime, was raised and silky, right in the center on the front and back of each hand. Like stigmata. Such personal mysteries intrigued me.
    When the conversation would inevitably lapse, we’d sit and stare at the large poster over his desk, Juan Luna’s masterpiece, the
Spoliarium—
its dead Roman gladiators being dragged across the floor of a coliseum’s subchamber, the faces of onlookers filled with grief, shock, disinterest, gothic fascination. At such times, I studied Crispin out of the corner of my eye, hunched, tired, in his squeaking chair in a tiny office that smelled like a goat wearing expensive aftershave, and I wondered about the road that had taken him to this point.
    *
    That evening, Erning Isip, the student from AMA Computer College, is still hanging out with his friends from Ateneo and La Salle. They drink and watch the Purefoods vs. Shell game in a beer garden near Padre Burgos, Makati’s red-light district. The student from Ateneo regales them with his dream of being a Supreme Court judge. The student from La Salle intimates that he’d like one day to run a shipping empire. Erning Isip tells them about how he’s behind in tuition payments. A particularly skanky girl passes, wearing a micro-mini denim skirt, a halter that reveals her muffin-top belly, long straight hair to the small of her back, and those precarious Plexiglas stilettos popular with dancers of the exotic discipline.
    The Atenenista says: “My God! A veritable Whore of Babylon!”
    The Lasallista says: “Nyeh! What a puta!”
    Erning Isip stares at the woman for some time. Then he exclaims: “Uy! My classmate from Intro to HTML!”
    *
    “It’s been nearly a year,” Granma said. “Isn’t it time you made peace?”
    “It’s only been eight months,” I said.
    “Why don’t you come home and spend Christmas with us?”
    “How’s Granddud?” The line was bad and there was a lag in our sentences.
    “He’s still your grandfather,” Granma said.