Back in 1989, I published a collection of short stories in Pilipino. It was not until just a month ago that I came across this review of my book in Philippine Studies, v. 39, no. 2, (1991). I would like to share it with you here.
P R I N S E S A NG K U M I N T A N G AT I B A P A N G KUWENTONG
PILIP I NO. By Romeo P. Virtusio. Manila: Cacho Publishing House, Inc.,
1989. 150 pages.
Prinsesa ng Kumintang, Romeo Virtusio's collection of short fiction, treats the
variousness of university intellectuals, public relations executives, the
banqucting principalia of the old Commonwealth period, nightclub crooners,
social climbing society columnists, sad bachelors, and ruminant nuns in the
light of social significance and consciousness. His fiction probes deeply int
the lives of the bourgeoisie, into the compromises to which they are seduced,
and their painful and private struggling to unbind themselves from all the
confused entrapments. And always, action suggests a simmering discontent,
the pulse and throb on the tap presaging a violent eruption already underway.
His characters always reach the edge of privacy as they are challenged
to cross the border leading to a social reawakening, sometimes gifted with
the knowledge that marks them differently, as when in the title story, the
beautiful and mythical princess favors the farmers' lawyer among her titled
and rich suitors. The banquets of old Batangas are recalled with graceful
elaboration. The whirl of voices in flippant conversation, witty retorts, and
small talk that sparks attraction capture painstakingly the manners of the
Tagalog as they feast on lechon and assorted duke, and drink Inmbanog.
The love story takes place the year before the Commonwealth is inaugurated.
History inflicts the protagonists with a strange fear which suggests that
even love is blessed by the tides of history. Marriages ride the same turbulent
historical waves that could just possibly crash ashore. These muted fears silence
the humble lawyer from proposing; the woman passes her time in hopeful
waiting as she convinces herself:
Ngunit ano ang maaaring idulot ng darating na komonwelt kundi ang
bagong liwanag? At ang anak ng gobernador, busilak na baguntaong kakatawan
sa mga pag-asang maluwalhating nagluluntian, hindi ba't siya'y dadalawin
nit0 sa Maynila? At ang abugadong ito? (p. 72)
The intimations of the unknown are ignored. History is relegated to the
background as the more personal "stories" of the lovers gain the foreground.
Comfort and security become the more traditional thesis of the story instead
of the more revolutionary thesis that love can actually embolden individuals
to face historical unknowns and grapple with them. By privileging individualism
over integration with society, the story becomes something of an antihistorical
narrative defeating its initial motion toward social consciousness.
Virtusio's fiction suffers in that its social vision and the program it constructs
and proposes exist predominantly in the patriarchal world. It is
ideologically slanted to relegate the women of his fiction to secondary and
passive positions in the power structure, constantly ruled and subjugated by
his male characters. His fiction represents women in the conventional and
stereotypical molds-desperate prostitutes, light-minded journalists, passive
and excitable colegiaas, and meek and virginal nuns.
In "Ang Pasipista," an aging courtesan wakes up one day aching and
strained with her endless hawking. Avelina, war-widow-turned-prostitute
contemplates a quiet and comfortable retirement. In its range of discourses,
this story extends even further to involve the problematic of motherhood.
Avelina prostitutes herself only because she is left with a son to raise. Shc
drags herself into this bodily perversion to provide Teddy the comfortable
life, bourgeois breeding and education that she has been denied.
The morning stretches on as she schemes to persuade Henry, her Chinese
businessman lover, to provide her ten thousand to send Teddy to either Atenm
or La Salle. But the outlawed negotiator momentarily disappoints her.
Meanwhile, Teddy becomes a well-regarded leader in the student movement,
and from the way he reasons, Avelina suspects him to be an activist. When
one night Henry arrives halfdrunk and hissing with insults for a group of
local politicians protesting his business, Teddy assaults him unexpectedly.
Teddy tramples him on the chest, over and over.
With this violent surprise, Teddy brings Avelina to her unexpected liberation.
The familial matrix seemingly justifies the resolution, but when one
considers the specificities of gender, the same resolution hardly endures.
Earlier on, Avelina muses:
,
. . . ngayon ko nga lamang naman naiisip, ang mga walanghiya, sabay pala
kaming ginagahasa . . . ng aking bayan, ang mga estrangherong mandarambong,
. . . mga Amerkano at Intsik;kailan, kailan pa kayo magbabayad
ng inyong mga utang? (p.123)
Where the story initially proposes that prostitution and motherhood are
keen experiences precipitating a consciousness of struggle, it ends by downplaying
the very possibility. The will to revolt is reserved for the man in the
family. The illumined journey to the dark rooms of "womanly" experiences
does little compared to Teddy's formal political awakening in effecting the
sort of individual subversion which the narrative foregrounds. Here, the old
chivalric motifs recur.
In the reading process, this is symptomatic of the perpetuation of oppressive
images and representations of woman in society that remain lodged and
unchallenged in the consciousness of contemporary readers of literature. Helene
Cixous, in 'The Laugh of the Medusa" sees literature as
a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and
over, more or less consciously, and in a manner that is frightening since
it is often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction. (p. 311)
In the light of political and pro-feminist readings, his fiction selfdestructs
in its very attempt to foreground radical discourses privileging social transformation.
In both acts of reading and writing, women can only be recognized as force
in and part of social revisioning. Revisioning must take place in as concrete
a ficld as gender, where the most basic and most ignored of oppressions take
placc. Good fiction necessarily tasks itself to liberate women, and all persons
at that, from convcntional and limiting representations constructed by society.
Danilo Francisco M. Reyes
Department of Filipino
Ateneo de Manila University
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