Ilustrado Read Online Free PDF Page A

famous poem called them. The epigraph of that piece was wonderful. Ho Chi Minh. “A poet must also learn how to lead an attack.”
    INTERVIEWER:
    Was there something that made you want to lead that attack?
    CS:
    Pride and fear of death. Truly. You smile but I kid you not.
    INTERVIEWER:
    Your return to the polemical is a criticism often cited. Did you . . .
    CS:
    It’s viewed as two steps backward. Erroneously. When you reach farther and farther, sometimes you come full circle. The task then becomes all the more difficult, false steps more likely—though the eventual outcome may become more pertinent. This of course opens you up to accusations of being quixotic or, worse—or perhaps better—messianic. Mind you, pretension and ambition are different words for the same thing. Truly, it’s the artist’s—the true artist’s—desire for causality that trips critics up.
    —from a 1991 interview in
The Paris Review
    *
    Three more hours until I arrive. At Manila. I almost said “at home.”
    It’s a trip I hate, both the voyage and the arrival, the limbo between outposts of humanity. Remember when air travel was fun? Toy pilot wings and smiling stewardesses showing you the massive cockpit? Now they separate us from our valuables and herd usthrough security gates, shoeless and anxious; they scare us with tales of deep-vein thrombosis; they pack us in like animals, then run Keanu Reeves on screens on the seat backs to lull us into a squirming stupor. Soon after we fall asleep, they wake us. I bet anyone who is still a Marxist has never had an economy-class middle seat on a packed long-haul flight like this one.
    Around me, in this tin can, my fellow travelers: we, the acquiescent, unaware insurrectionists; we who have left and returned so constantly throughout history our language has given us a name—balikbayan. Sloped-shouldered we are, freighted by absence; our hand-carries bulging with items that wouldn’t fit in overweight luggage, all the countless gifts for countless relatives—proof our time away has not been wasted.
    These are my people. (Crispin once called them the “splay-toed, open-hearted.”) Beside me, a stocky, sturdy man in an acid-wash denim jacket and a slipping eyeshade, his head thrown back to snore efficaciously. Likely a construction worker, one of the millions-strong diaspora indentured by the persuasiveness of dreams. To my other side, two older ladies, sisters by the look of them, fidget and flip through the inflight magazine for the sixteenth time. Their inflatable pillows around their necks remind me of yokes on water buffalo, if that’s not too obvious a metaphor. One has a rosary wrapped around one hand. With the other, she turns the pages to the photographs. Her sister complains she’s going too fast. Across the aisle, a petite Filipina with towering shoes rests her blond head on the shoulder of a Texas-big American, his glasses low on his wedgelike nose, reading Dale Carnegie in a pool of light. A snake-and-dagger tattoo slithers up his forearm. Behind sits a spry, elderly Caucasian, his white hair, warm-up jacket, and khakis rumpled in the fashion of intrepid Jesuits or vacationing pedophiles. To his side, a duet of tirelessly gossiping domestic helpers continue their nine-hour run. Their heads, wrapped in eyeshades that hold back their hair, peck at morsels of hyperbole, like pigeons at rice dropped on the pavement of park promenades every Sunday, day off to the maids who flock by the thousands in the big cities of the world. I’ve twice heard about what Minda did to Linda and thrice cringed at the horrible thing Dottie said to Edilberto. I took notes, smiled, when Iheard one complain: “She stabbed me in the back and my back wasn’t even turned.” The women’s bluster and brusqueness are crystallized by years of servitude, unconvincing confidence, irreconcilable distance from the things to which they once clung closely.
    I myself didn’t see what Crispin had become to me