Vignette Halftones
By Aileen Victoria Ibardaloza

As a young reader, I was very particular about beginnings; they had to grab me. The narrative energy had to be substantive for me to want to move along with the characters through the action.

This is how I remember good stories: they are the stories I would have liked to have told. Stories which moved me; I am drawn out to react, to imagine because the author/s invariably trusted in my ability and creativity, as a reader, to flesh out motivations and sensibilities. I was ten when I was introduced to Baldo, and it was his voice, as narrator, that I heard when Manuel Arguilla wrote of Nagrebcan. The local color fascinated me, carts and camino reals being more visceral (then) than yellow buses and boroughs. It was a time and place so far removed from where I was that I wanted to know how to get there. It was only much later that I came to understand that Arguilla's landscape is a literary scene, not necessarily evocative of the historical realities of rural life.

The sun was in our eyes, for it was dipping into the bright sea. The sky was wide and deep and very blue above us: but along the saw-tooth rim of the Katayaghan hills to the southwest flamed huge masses of clouds. Before us the fields swam in a golden haze through which floated big purple and red and yellow bubbles when I looked at the sinking sun. Labang's white coat, which I had washed and brushed that morning with coconut husk, glistened like beaten cotton under the lamplight and his horns appeared tipped with fire. He faced the sun and from his mouth came a call so loud and vibrant that the earth seemed to tremble underfoot. And far away in the middle of the field a cow lowed softly in answer. [1]

From the Waig, to the wardrobe, up the yellow brick road, every story I encountered offered possibilities. A lamp-post could be put up in the middle of a wood, and silver shoes can carry a girl to any place in three winks. As a young reader, I was very particular about beginnings; they had to grab me. The narrative energy had to be substantive for me to want to move along with the characters through the action. And all endings, naturally, had to have been resolved happily. In Philippine culture, the potential to exercise participatory imagination is tapped by grandmothers (or great-aunts who, in many families, are also called "lola" and happen to be proverbial storytellers). Bienvenido Lumbera recalls,

In my youth in Lipa, there were no books. My parents died early and we grew up with my paternal grandmother. Whatever reading I did during those early years were awits and corridos borrowed from the housemaids. These were pamphlets sold in churchyards, spread out in bilaos, costing 10 to 15 centavos each. There were weekly magazines like Liwayway and other magazines putting out literary materials. I grew up during the Japanese occupation and borrowed novels written in Tagalog in book form or those serialized in magazines. But what I found most enjoyable was gathering around an aunt, listening to her read out chapter after chapter of the stories. [2]

Authors have great control over how their stories are unalterably lodged in the reader's memory, whether through irresolute endings or the character's discovery of self, allowing him/her to break from and change his/her situation. It is up to us, as readers, to determine what the story is about. (Of course, the author's tone can greatly affect our interpretation.)

While the story is more about character than plot, I was taken aback when it climaxed with a chocolate cake. And like all things flavored with chocolate, this one ends pleasurably.

I am a reader, and what sleeps with me is the sum total of all the stories I survived.

*****

With 175,000 books published each year, I often find myself browsing through titles. A title, after all, is a distinguishing name, with the power to set apart a written work from all others. Eileen Tabios' La Luna "Before Silence of Winter Comes" admittedly gave me images of a fully visible moon in December, even as it evoked a sense of isolation. It is the story of an artist (unnamed) and the complex interactions surrounding her world; of "art and eros as moral equivalents". [3] While the story is more about character than plot, I was taken aback when it climaxed with a chocolate cake. And like all things flavored with chocolate, this one ends pleasurably.

Meanwhile, as I adjusted my diet to my pregnancy, I've rediscovered desserts. Dark, dense, flourless, chocolate cake is still my favorite. But, facilitated by the temptations at the French Bakery in downtown Santa Fe, I also now eat leche flan, pumpkin pie, strawberry tarts, lemon mousse and even vanilla cream cakes. How much there is in life to relish!

I've discovered something else in New Mexico—the light. A light that begins each moon with an orange glow. In my dreams, however, the moon is lustrous amber because the colors in my dreams always transcend reality. In my dreams, grey becomes silver and yellow becomes gold. Jason puts it another way: in dreams, the "silence of winter" never arrives. For silence has no color. [4]

When I come across a good story, I can taste its variant hues. I know, for instance, that white is seldom bland, and blue, most often, sweet, scattered as they are by water droplets and dust, by impalpable specks in the air.

Footnotes:

[1] Manuel Estabillo Arguilla, How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife[Online] (Dumaguete City: A Critical Survey of Philippine Literature, accessed 1 July 2005); available from http://www.geocities.com/icasocot/arguilla_leon.html.

[2] Neni Sta. Romana-Cruz, Bienvenido Lumbera, book lover [Online] (Manila: Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2004, accessed 1 July 2005); available from http://www.inq7.net/lif/2003/oct/12/lif_2-1.htm.

[3] Tom Beckett, Give and Take: A Few More Notes about 'Behind the Blue Canvas: Stories by Eileen Tabios (Giraffe Books, 2004) ; [Online] (Ohio: Unprotected Texts, 2004, accessed 1 July 2005); available from http://vanishingpoints.blogspot.com.

[4] Eileen R. Tabios, La Luna "Before Silence of Winter Comes" [Online] (Virginia: Our Own Voice, 2004, accessed 1 July 2005); available from http://www.oovrag.com/stories/stories2003c-2.shtml. La Luna "Before Silence of Winter Comes" is one of the stories in Eileen Tabios' first short story collection entitled Behind The Blue Canvas published by Giraffe Books in 2004.

© Aileen Victoria Ibardaloza

top | about the author