...and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us ...
- The Lord's prayer

'Bout time.

It took me a while to finish this book written by Linda Ty-Casper, yeah,  due to my Computer programming projects that seem to get more and more complicated each passing day. Ask a C programmer about strings and pointers and arrays of pointers and he'd tell you exactly what I mean.

But I've finally read through the end of Awaiting Trespass and Ty-Casper is definitely for a serious reader - there is a calm affect in this her work yet it is terse, it  carries a subtle religiosity yet it is liberal, throughout this book I imagined this storyteller as one of those conservative, prim and proper relatives who'd be telling me some savage stuff without getting hysterical. The set-up is definitely rich in money and character and anecdotes. And considering my age, I understand its language both in time-frame and relativity. I do understand why this book wasn't published during Marcos years - it verbalized the anti-Marcos sentiment of that time.  My advise to a reader of this book: Read it in one sitting, it's not meant to be read little by little, (the way I did) because it's a stream-of-consciousness novel, the story teller wishes to convey her message in a certain philosophical way - not via action , but via contemplation.

"But how did he die? In whose house? With whom?...
"And why will he hide from us? At this important time when we come to say goodbye to him! a sealed casket! Something is not right, besides the suddenness."

Linda Ty-Casper thus opens a novel that propels the Gil family into a meditation about the Philippines during Marcos years. And though  I can say this novel is tame compared to an activist writer's novel that could be written today, I will not dare say that because this Ty-Casper's novel is probably one of the most difficult, risky novels one could have written at the time and age it was written.

It would be easy to write Awaiting Trespass  if one would be using the point of view of a middle class family, or better, a poor family. But here is Ty-Casper talking about Philippine political savagery - yet, she wears silk gloves (the way New York Times Book Review) puts it. I do totally agree.

That's how beautiful Linda Ty-Casper's writing is, she's one who would keep sanity in a world of chaos, she's one who would cultivate a garden in the middle of a junkyard. Reminiscent of Cecilia Manguerra-Brainard's writings, her English is without flaw, so smooth and so interconnected it is that if you stop reading in the middle, you  better start from the beginning again when you resume reading, otherwise you'd lose the flow. Ty-Casper didn't exactly think of MTV-short-attention-span- readers-like-me when she wrote this novel.

Still, let me give you a short short idea about this novel: It revolves around a family gathering in the wake of Don Severino Gil  whose body  arrived in a sealed casket that leaves everyone wondering - Why so? Everyone in the family arrives, each contemplating life, beauty, politics, relations, experiences, the past, politics, society, military, money, investments, politics, activism, multinational companies, anti-Imperialism, politics, and then, the flow gets religious and  philosophical, painful  (as the....well, I won't tell you the end) in the end.

I don't wanna give away the entire story but let me remind you dear reader about our old Marcosian dialogues that Ty-Casper cared to record for our collective memories, I'm sure we've heard and thought  these lines before:

"-a friend mailed her Camels straight from New York to be certain of freshness and because blue seals could be faked-" (que horror! blue seals?)

"She is about to live in her thoughts again, thirteen floors above the sea while on the dance floors behind the glass doors, retired generals are swinging old bodies to young beats; this one ordered the Metrocom to sweep students off the streets around Mendiola in '71; that one coordinated the armed forces at Malacanang, the Presidential guards, against the students protesting government-occupation of the country. Where is the one who held Tirad Pass against American sharpshooters, who refused to surrender in Misamis? In Santa Barbara? In Bataan?" (you see,  Ty-Casper was already asking where the good ol' Filipino soldiers went as early as the the 70's, gosh, that's thirty years ago!!! )

"If the administrators of martial law were really concerned about the country they would not have allowed the Kawasaki sintering plant, " the aunt continues, leaning toward Sevi as in confession. "The Japanese  refused to have that steel filtering process in their own country, because it's ecologically unsafe for all kinds of life...
"But we hold life cheaply here. Pesticides, herbicides, tainted milk - anything unsafe in the world finds its way to the Philippines. That nuclear plant Westinghouse is building cannot pass safety inspection in the United States. Do you realize where the power lines are going? To the American bases, to the export processing zones where foreign industries, which do not pay taxes or come under our laws, can exploit Filipino workers. They take their profits home too." (reading this makes me feel as though Ty-Casper is predicting things to come, think of the recent health scare in the Pinoy-land)

"And I might as well say, for whatever good it does, that if we do not stop selling our trees to Japan, we will be importing lumber by the year 2000. That's in less than twenty years. What a patrimony we're leaving to future generations!" (are we importing lumber yet?)

"Aurelio Gil cannot let the remark stand. "Do you remember how we adapted the new Constitution? I live in San Juan. In January of '73 our neighborhood was called to a meeting. Just like the Japanese neighborhood associations, we were asked if we wanted rice. There were lines for rice then, you recall. Our hands went up. A photographer took pictures. The next day, there I was in the newspaper with my arm raised. The caption said, the new Constitution has been overwhelmingly approved in the barangays. That's the new election system. 'Voting' with me were youths no more than fourteen ...."( I remember those years clearly!)

And lastly,

"Why not, why not Attorney? The arrogance of the President in assuming powers he gives to himself makes it possible for tyranny to seep down. He has constitutional powers only because he changed the Constitution to give himself those powers. Anyone with imperial instincts models himself after the one in Malacanang, making and interpreting the laws to his advantage. So many little dictators all over the country, clones of the one in Malacanang. And no recourse against any of them...." (So there is Ty-Casper for you!)

Don't misinterpret the way I picked these lines for my web site, I don't wanna give the impression that this novel is purely dialoguing this way. I am copying these dialogues primarily because I want to remind myself about my generation. Those who lived their adolescence  in the seventies and their college in the eighties, the way I did, value these lines because they were our generation's lines. Reading this novel by Ty-Casper makes me feel so alive - I see pictures of Manila - and the people during my life in there. We did not expect the turns of events in the eighties, we did not expect my generation to produce People Power. In college, we'd always look at each others and sigh in sadness when we talked about the dictatorship. We whispered, "There is no other way to get rid of that man in Malacanang except an armed war." Still, we made The Road between total failure as a country to a country full of hope.

I feel that's what Telly, the 49 year old divorcee, the major character in the novel is trying to tell me. She remains steadfast in her beliefs, thinking, thinking, thinking, analyzing, recalling, reacting to everything around her. She puts to heart whatever is happening around her and my God, her discipline and self-control is so intense and so inspiring. This is what separates a Filipina writer like Ty-Casper from the other divas of Philippine literature. She is definitely convent-bred, no hysterics and cussing (which I like to do in my writing, and honey I am a DIVA tambien)
 

from the book-cover:

A wake in Manila for the aging playboy Don Severino Gil is the setting for social satire and personal awakening. The gathering family speculate about the reasons why Don Severino's coffin is sealed. Was it to protect his privacy? Was he showing contempt for the society that indulged him? Did he want to conceal some mutilation at the hands of a rival, some jealous woman, or her husband? Or is he alive, in hiding?

Speculation soon turns to the  subject of the Pope's forthcoming progress to the Philippines. Don Severino's three sisters vie for position as first among mourners while laying plans to repaint the house in the Pope's colors.

The wake is also the occasion for the maturing of two isolated people who have been struggling to find themselves: Don Severino's favorite niece, Telly, a 49 year old divorcee who composes poetry spontaneously and who has a tendency towards suicide; and Sevi, the dead man's son, a middle-aged priest without sure knowledge that he has been "called".

Alex Maskara is Pinoy

Volume 1