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Introduction

IntroductionNEW ENGLISH writing by contemporary Filipino authors is at its liveliest in the collected stories and essays of Menchu Aquino Sarmiento whose prose corruscates and scintillates as she pins down characters of the Filipino upper class living out their paltry dreams and aspirations.

The first story in this collection, “Allos the Word Thief” offers the reader an early introduction to the tone and style of the author. The piece is a take-off from the first part of Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart. Sarmiento positions Bulosan as the young Allos in a cynical moment recounting incidents that went into a narration of his boyhood in Mangusmana in Pangasinan. From the book that saw publication (1946) in the U.S., Sarmiento’s Bulosan snorts at his rendition of the wedding of his elder brother where he claims that a crowd of wedding guests surrounded the hut where the newly-weds were spending their first night together. The crowd was waiting to know whether the bride was a virgin when she lay with then groom, and when it turned out she was not, they tied her to a tree and horse-whipped her before the village. Bulosan denies any such event happened. It was an invention intended to appeal to an American audience.

Sarmiento’s tone coupled with her sophisticated handling of irony gives her stories an air of cultivated indifference that masks a deep concern with human behavior. Such concern accounts for her exceptional skill in bringing to life her characters.

In “Vanitas,” the story opens with Ruel, a former seminarian now the hen-pecked husband of an upperclass matron, who helplessly faces a bleak morning after there had been break-in at their residence. He goes to his job at a Customs Brokerage, and the reader is introduced to Manang Celia, the most senior clerk in the office, steeped in religious fervor, also known as “the Angel of Recycling” because she is given to making blinds, vessels, rosaries and what-not out of old newspapers and installing the items all over the office. Before he can head for home after office, Ruel is dragged by his boss to join in entertaining a party of Chinese business guests. Sir Philip is a coarse and crude macho who has no second thoughts about reviling a maître d’hotel in front of his guests and embarrassing Ruel for being timid and deferential. Late that night, Ruel comes home to overhear his wife on the phone, setting a lunch appointment with a man at a hotel. He suspects an adulterous assignation. The following morning, Ruel stations himself at the lobby of the hotel, but neither party shows up. The sad, ridiculous story of Ruel closes with his going to the office in a cab, and listening to the driver’s tall story about a dog that died in a road accident.

More characters are laid out for the reader in “Que Lastima! Espero Que Tue Se Mejore.” Here we have a gathering at a beach party attended by a scattering of coño characters. Two aging homosexuals (Bart and Melo) and young tricycle drivers who are potential short-time lovers frame the story as though to highlight the decadence of the gathering. The party is for Michelle Alba who is turning sixteen and present is Don, her near-lover cousin. In the party is Valerie Lu who has been invited in spite of herself because her father is a business partner of Mr. Alba. A young-lady-of-the-world, Caritas has come with an alderly American for a date. Bart and Melo press Caritas about the s****l prowess of her date. As the evening progresses, the dates seek the privacy of their special spaces.

Given her deft hand at creating characters, Sarmiento may be expected to turn into a novelist if she is able to develop her narrative inventiveness. “Consider the Lilies,” a three-narrative account of three women with the same name “Lily” shows the promise of her novelistic imagination, giving us the separate stories of the women and their respective families.

Combined with the consummate skill with which she has depicted the richly-detailed atmosphere of the cultural setting of the cocktail party in “To Those for Whom English Is a Second Language,” Sarmiento assures us that when she does write her first novel, we will be treated to an absorbing narrative about the characters that people her stories.

Bienvenido Lumbera

National Artist for Literature

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