Ang Larawan

Introduction by Lourd de Veyra

INTRODUCTION

YOU AND NICK AGAINST THE WORLD: A PORTRAIT OF

“PORTRAIT” IN THREE PORTRAITS (Or 25 Reasons Why You

Must Read A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino—No. 23 Will Make

You Cry, I Think)

1. To things we hold most dear we ascribe nicknames. So it is lovingly referrred

to as “Portrait” the way we abbreviate the Noli and the Fili. Thankfully I have

yet to hear of anyone reducing it to what would sound like—at least to Filipino

ears—a rather inelegant acronym, or someone about to cough out a swear word:

APOTAAF.

2. Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, which was first serialized in

Women’s Weekly Magazine in 1952, is one of Philippine literature’s enduring works.

By the time of its publication, Joaquin, at only age 33, was already a literary

rockstar. Says the biography penned by his nephew, prior to Portrait, Nick Joaquin

had never written a play and it was only upon the prompting of his sister-in-law

Sarah. Not bad for a first-timer. Kinda like Orson Welles, who makes his first film

and, oh, look, it just happened to become the most influential movie of all time.

3. You could run a finger across the words “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino” and get a thick dusty clump on your fingertip. Aging spinsters? Bedridden painters (bedridden and invisible, depending on which version you watched)? They’re not usually cast as lead characters unless they’re stabbing each other to death or are actually winged superheroines in mild-mannered disguise. Perhaps for the Millennials of today, it would be interesting to ask: what is the significance of Portrait to their manic-click-and-share lives? How would it fit into their instant-gratification, five-thousand-frames-per-minute-140-character- attention span, this generation for whom any online video over three minutes is usually an epic and anything over two pages on the computer screen is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? How does it stand in the age of dissonance, memes, fake news, and covfefe? Apart from i********: fodder for students in the National Museum re-enacting the tableaux of dead gladiators, what else is the significance of the Spoliarium— unless given a new reading to reflect the escalating iconographies of tokhang?

4. The setting: October 1941 two months before the Pearl Harbor attack, the winds of war already howling in this part of the planet. In the crumbling Marasigan home in Intramuros, two sisters are at war with immediate domestic concerns like unsettled electricity, gas, medical bills, etc. with no one answering their ads for Spanish and piano lessons. On a symbolic level, they are also at war with the present and its values that the house’s inhabitants find abrasively alienating.

Their brother Manolo and sister Pepang want to sell the house and divide the furniture amongst themselves. The centerpiece of the decaying house is a painting by their father Don Lorenzo, a famous artist and former revolutionary. The painting already has a potential buyer. With such a temptingly huge price tag, the sale could be Candida and Paula’s ticket out of creeping destitution and dream jaunts to Spain, France, and Italy.

5. In today’s psycho-sphere rattled by clickbait articles, terrorism, social-media porn, and extra-judicial killings, Portrait stands out like a glaring anachronism. You might accuse it of living, to use the words of a cynical character here, in “the dead world of the past,” peppered by passing references here are of antiquarian provenance: ancient Latin chants by Franciscans (“Dies irae, dies illa,” anyone?), lines by Keats, “Vereda Tropical,” Kolynos dental cream. There’s some screaming, yes, but no bitchslapping involved (bitchslapping, along with hairpulling, face-scratching, eye-gouging, back-to-the-wall emotional breakdowns being usual requisites in Pinoy dramas). There’s also very little physical movement happening. No fireworks of limbs and expletives, unless your idea of pyrotechnics is the La Naval.

6. Thus the question: Is the Portrait not future-proof?

7. Portrait is one of the major works that cement Joaquin’s reputation as Great Venerator of Our Hispanic past. “To accuse the Spanish, over and over again, of having brought us all sorts of things, mostly evil, among which we can usually remember nothing valuable “except, perhaps,” religion and national unity, is equivalent to saying of a not very model mother that she has given her child nothing except life.”

A recurring notion throughout Portrait is that the past is perpetual paradise, a lost Eden, a more innocent, genteel time of tertullas, piano lessons, fluency in Spanish, religious parades, etc. La Naval? I mean, seriously, who gets turned on by the second Sunday of October except theology nerds in UST? (“Why sure! A commemoration of Catholic triumph over the Dutch armada in 1646 through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary? Bring out the beer!”) Nick Joaquin, by the way, wrote a glittering tribute to La Naval de Manila in 1943.

8. But how is it “dead?” Can anything in this crazy post-post-postmodern cultural universe be actually dead? Hollywood still actively ransacks ancient Greek and Roman myths for their superhero series and fastfood toys. Technically, the Liberation of Manila was just a little over 72 years ago, and Nick Joaquin’s play is only 62 years old. For some perspective, Superman the comicbook first appeared 79 years ago. And all three things—the Liberation, Superman, and Portrait—are still literally younger than Juan Ponce Enrile. At 93 years old, Enrile is still living and breathing, occasionally seen on social media justifying Duterte’s Martial Law in his white tennis shorts.

9. The past, Joaquin argues, “can become ‘usable’ only if we be willing to enter into its spirit and carry there a reasonably hospitable mind. As long as we regard it with hatred, contempt and indignation, so long will it remain hateful and closed to us. Like a mirror (to borrow Aldous Huxley’s image of the Future), it will meet us with spears if we advance toward it with spears. And as long as we remain estranged from it, so long will we remain a garish and uncouth and upstart people, without graces because without background.”

10. Portrait is about three people fighting off the world—at least the world of mahjong, jai alai, horse races, crass commercialism, advertising and Hollywood, a world that is increasingly hostile to their fragile and dwindling sphere of dignity and grace. Against a generation, described using a reference to Eliot’s “Hollow Men” as “behaving as the wind behaves.”

The war—by “sword and fire—may have killed Candida, Paula, and Don Lorenzo but what the play affirms is that the war did not extinguish the values they cherished. In the end it is not the melancholic past we mourn but the tragic, vulgar present.

But it is precisely the “deadness” of this world where the play draws its defiant fist. Contra Mundum—literally “against the world”—is a refrain heard in the second act, and in the closing part repeated with heroic, almost talismanic affirmation by Candida and Paula. It is, in essence, the play’s battlecry—a raging against the tides of time. While Joaquin calls in an “elegy,” Portrait actually ends on a hopeful note: the antagonistic characters (most of them family) finally driven out the house, the Marasigans are finally at peace, watching with friends and guests the La Naval Procession outside the window below. Life goes on.

11. But you can still enjoy Portrait even without having to wrestle with the terrifying Angels of History and Literature. Not everything written by National Artists has to go under the scalpel of Lit Crit 101. Read Portrait for sheer pleasure. In his 1951 essay on the Rizal novels, Joaquin pointed out that our trembling veneration for Rizal’s books—as sacred tomes meant for profound genuflection and unlocking deep-seated truths—are the same things that keep us from appreciating them as literary works, if not simply as enjoyably well-written stories. After decades of stagings, critical deconstructions, and multimedia adaptations, it might seem ironic that Joaquin’s play may have taken on the same intimidating veneer.

12. But for the language. My goodness, the intoxicating language. There’s Bitoy Camacho as a somewhat Sophoclean expressionistic narrator. The force of his intro alone is vintage Joaquin—a breathless recitation of Manila’s byzantine incarnations and inhabitants, sweeping through the arrabals of remembrance, through ancient Biblical locations to Rome, from mystics and merchants to harlots. Manila in this oration sounds like purely magical realist city (Note: One Hundred Years of Solitude, itself a book inhabited by magicians and whores, was not to be published until 1967).

It’s a rather lengthy intro, but it’s seductively Joaquinesque prose and you shouldn’t really mind, unless you’re a stage director or a filmmaker and producer shackled by a strict running time. And to this concern, Avellana, both for the stage renditions of 1956 and onward as well as the ’65 film, had done some major surgical facelifts. Portrait as printed in the 2017 Penguin Classics edition of The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic runs to approximately 132 pages. Portrait the play was first staged in 1955 by the Barangay Theater Guild led by Lamberto Avellana and wife Daisy Hontiveros (who also played Candida). As originally written, the play would have lasted four hours, so the Avellanas with Joaquin’s permission, trimmed it to two hours and a half.

In the service of cinema, the literally invisible elements of the play—the painting and Don Lorenzo—appear in Avellana’s movie. “The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences,” argued Susan Sontag. But time is when you really can’t argue with the filmmaker.

13. Portrait has often been accused by critics as being a “drama of ideas,” substituting “statement for dramatization,” a philosophical treatise on the tension between past and present disguised in the habiliments of theater. Someone also said that it seems it was truly meant to be read rather than staged.

14. But on the issue of prolixity, I would anytime gladly dive into Nick Joaquin, a writer incapable of a vapid sentence. Study his rhythm, the sublime choreography of words, the tension between rhapsodic fusillade and short bursts. From this they can only benefit, young readers and writers of today weaned on “listicles” and other social-media formats that demand graceless brevity, the generation of today for whom reading a long-form magazine article is already a Proustian feat.

15. Read it for the magnificent one-liners: “How can you write about Art and not bring in the slums of Tondo?” Pete’s lengthy diatribe against the old and bitter Revolutionaries (“Bacause they were not big enough after all to handle the Future”). There are the convos on debates on art and compromise, boiling with wit and sarcasm:

“Art should be socially significant; Art has a function…”

BITOY: Like making people brush their teeth?

PETE: Like making people brush their teeth.

BITOY: Then Don Lorenzo is a highly successful artist.

PETE: He ought to go and work for Kolynos Toothpaste.

CORA: As I always say, the real artists of our time are the advertising men.

BITOY: Michaelangelo plus Shakespeare equals a Kolynos ad.

16. This is not to say that Portrait does not make for great drama. Read it for the scenes, many of which have become the stuff of ikon: quasi-seduction by hot chocolate, for instance, when the smooth devil Tony Javier sips from the flabbergasted Paula’s cup—a gesture that scandalized her sister Candida, as if he showed up wearing only a condom and a 666 tattoo on his forehead. Imagine how Candida would react to today’s tequila body shots.

17. Read it for the moments of black-comic relief: an earnest Candida applying to the local health department as rat-catcher and distraught when they laughed and threatened to throw her into the nuthouse. (This alone could be the plot for a quasi-absurdist one-act play.) Actually, Candida would have been gainfully employed in Mumbai, India with a salary of somewhere near 15,000 rupees a month (around P19,000).

18. Joaquin’s play has also been translated into Filipino a number of times, by Alfred Yuson and Franklin Osorio, Bienvenido Lumbera, to name a few. Yet it is testament to Portrait’s immensity that it persists not just in translations but also in incarnations in other genres. In 1997, based on the Joaquin masterpiece Rolando Tinio wrote and directed the musical Ang Larawan starring Celeste Legaspi and Zsa Zsa Padilla, with Ryan Cayabyab setting the Tinio libretto to music. In 2017, Culturtain Musicat Productions, the same producers behind Ang Larawan, takes their opus to the big screen, this time with Rachel Alejandro and Joanna Ampil, with Loy Arcenas directing.

19. Of course, every translation becomes a different creation—a completely fresh protoplasm. But the libretto for Ang Larawan, the musical and the screenplay for the movie aren’t just a matter of linguistic transference.

You may ask what exactly is the point of publishing a screenplay or a libretto for that matter? And by what standards exactly? Fidelity to the original source material? But they’re entirely different animals altogether. Also, this question: how does one evaluate a libretto and a musical? Wouldn’t that be like judging cake-baking competition based on the recipes alone? The world of opera, for instance, brims with librettos that have some of the goofiest, the most contrived stories, plots, and characters. Yet nobody complains when the music of Handel or Mozart begins, the point being the music always seems superior to the drama. However, it is to the great fortune of Philippine literature and theater that Rolando Tinio’s translated adapation is a masterpiece on its own. And to further count our blessings, Ryan Cayabyab’s music is equally brilliant (Ang Larawan, The Musical is available on Youtube for everyone to enjoy. Thank you, Girlie Rodis).

20. Tinio’s Tagalog text is wonderfully colloquial, conversational, lean and muscular, distills the natural efflorescence of Joaquin’s dialogue into robust one-liners with an unimpeachable poetic ear. Consider this duet by the sisters, with the simple power of near-monosyllables.

“Bakit natin hinangad

Na ritrato’y maibenta

Para magkapera’t makasali

Sa mundo ng walang kuwenta?

Bakit tayo naiinggit

Sa mundo ng ordinaryo?

Bakit ba naloka’t naisipang

Buhay natin ay kalbaryo?

Kung ang tao sa ngayon,

Nasa isip puro pera

At hindi na uso’ng poesia,

Di na baleng magkagera!”

Tinio’s text is deliberately terse and sinewy, its short choppy lines meant for musical appropriation but never fractures the spirit of Joaquin’s original. For instance, this line by Candida from the original source: “Well, they are not going to make us do it. You and I are going to stay right here. We were born here and we will die here.”

Tinio divides it, with a kind of stoic cadence, and allots the first part to the other sister:

PAULA

Hindi nila tayo mapipilit. Basta’t dito tayong dalawa.

CANDIDA

Dito tayo ipinanganak, dito tayo mamamatay.

21. A screenplay is a filmmaker’s roadmap. And to this end, Ang Larawan the movie’s responsibilities are manifold: how to navigate Joaquin’s narrative and at the same time, Tinio’s text and Cayabyab’s music. It’s a different challenge faced by Lamberto Avellana’s 1964 opus. Naturally, Ang Larawan the 2017 film appears to us as youthful and vibrant placed side by side with Avellana’s. Of course, there is something about the black-and-white patina that instantly transports us to another time, or, if you wish, reminiscent of the Italian neorealist visual palette. Both Tinio’s musical and Avellana’s film are draped in the original’s Gothic penumbra.

22. The two films adopt different strategies for Bitoy Camacho’s opening narration. The ’65 Avellana compresses it into a masterful montage with a voiceover and jumps right into a nightclub scene where Tony Javier plays piano as tropical dancers sashay onstage. This short dance interlude dissolves into a dimly lit scene in the back of a calesa where he slithers with a pretty dancer. As they sneak into the old house, two old sisters peek from the window. This the first time we see Candida and Paula, bathed in shadows, illumined only by a solitary candle. Also, just the first few minutes into the film Avellana actually shows the painting. Not too long after, we also see Don Lorenzo who even has speaking lines.

Ang Larawan the Movie director Loy Arcenas prefers the painting invisible, as in Tinio’s musical and renders the opening monologue into a seductive tango, establishing the film’s mood and tone. Before introducing us to Candida and Paula, Arcenas’s camera first takes us to a short rendezvous with some supporting characters, with a little inside joke thrown in involving Ricky Davao.

23. The end of Sequence 17, where the sisters embrace each other sobbing is a masterful shot, easily one of the most striking images in Ang Larawan the 2017 movie. And, as in the original Joaquin, it is among the most memorable, a thespic tour-de-force: All of a sudden the lights are out and the sisters are gripped not by the darkness but by the fear of unpaid electric bills, and the potential humiliation in the eyes of neighbors—until they remember that the blackout was part of a wartime drill. Candida’s descent into fits of half-laughing half-sobbing is a supreme challenge to any actor. Truly, there are things a script doesn’t fully provide, that ultimately, everything remains subject to directorial fiat. Note, in the screenplay, how the dialogue sizzles but followed by a rather unremarkable scene description.

CANDIDA

[Patuloy na tatawa.] May black-out ngayon. Nagpapraktis ng black-out! Naghahanda para sa giyera. At akala natin… Natatakot tayong magsara ng bintana! Natatakot tayong matanaw ng kapitbahay! ‘Di ba isang pares tayong tonta at kalahati?! Isang pares na tonta! Naku, Paula! Nakatatawa! Nakatatawa! Nakatatawa!

[Patuloy na tatawa si CANDIDA hanggang sa mapahagulgol. Lalapitan siya ni PAULA at yayakapin ito.]

PAULA

Candida, Candida…

CANDIDA

Hindi ko na kaya! Hindi ko na kaya!

[Mapapasalampak si Candida sa sahig dahil sa panlulumo.]

24. Think of this book as a bag of goodies, a bundle of possibilities: The original play, the libretto for the musical and the screenplay for the latest movie version. It will prove to be of great value, to the student not just of translation but also of adaptations in other genres. Both libretto and screenplay are precious since they are carved out of the same exquisite stone. Treat it as a map, or a guide for comparative studies, for the prospects are endless—and Portrait is a gift that keeps on giving. A full-on rock-and-roll operetta? Why not? How about a jazz musical from the point of view of a more drunken and disillusioned Tony Javier? Or a backstory of why the senator Don Perico had compromised his ideals? Or a play focusing on the most intriguing character of them all—the narrator Bitoy Camacho himself —and why he thinks his childhood a lie? Or, as mentioned earlier, Candida as professional rat-catcher?

A spoof? Why not? In 1993, Nonon Padilla wrote and directed his take on Joaquin’s masterpiece: Portrait of the Filipino as Artist (note the reversal of “artist” and “Filipino,” a sequel of sorts set in the Martial Law era when Candida and Paula are now Forbes Parks residents traumatized by pesky reporters. Not at all sacrilegious in the right hands—remember, the first prerequisite of parody is love.

25. Why, in Nick’s words, cast “a pious eye for the past?” So what if it isn’t “hip?” That is exactly the spirit of contra mundum. In the words of pop balladeer Lionel Richie, why would anyone want to be hip? Hip is now. Why be now when you can be forever? That this play is outdated and anachronistic is precisely the point it rages against, a big fat middle finger to that exact notion. Its timelessness is its subversion. Rhapsodized the 17th century German romantic writer Jean-Paul Richter: “Memory is the paradise from which we cannot be expelled.”

The past—the classical past, especially—is not an old man croaking for a bit of recognition. It is a majestic, mountainous cloud hovering above the fate of all men at all times. The more we are immersed in the discourse, the more we appreciate the vitality of the ancient.

T.S. Eliot wrote: “Every great writer is always writing about his times, even when he seems to be writing about something else…” To paraphrase another Eliot quote: Someone said that the dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know. And because of them, we have Google. The past is the shoulder of giants on which we modern pygmies stand.

Lourd de Veyra

A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino

An Elegy in Three Scenes

by

Nick Joaquin

National Artist for Literature

How but in custom and in the ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born? —YEATS