Story: A Reprieve by Gian Carlo Velasco

A Reprieve

Gian Carlo Velasco

I

The sun bleeds over the city skyline, its dying light tinting the yacht-filled bay. Through the wrought-iron window of the restaurant, you watch a parade of humanity pass you by. Half-naked streetchildren noisily dive into the waves to fish out leftovers to feed their dogs. Beneath the coconut trees lined up in the avenue rest lovers clad in slippers and jerseys, exchanging jokes while groping each other’s crotch on the sly. White-haired businessmen and government officials rush to the ceramic lobby of a hotel, their leather portfolios swinging in their hands. The coffee-stained manuscript of your novel is spread before you. On its front page are placed the words The Conspiracy by Matiás Asuncion. After paying the bill, you glance at your watch and board a grey taxi.

II

Conrado gave you a nod when you entered his condominium unit. He opened the refrigerator and poured you a glass of iced tea. You took your seat in the dining table. Air Supply ballads from his stereo filled the vintage-themed room.

               

“I’m really sorry,” he repeated after you finished the beef stew he served earlier. “You worked hard on your manuscript, we know, but Fermina herself told me that publishing another trade book this year might no longer be such a prudent idea.”

               

You wiped your mouth with a napkin. Conrado avoided your stare.

               

“Who evaluated me?” you asked, your hands clasping your knees. “Why did he—or was it a she?—reject The Conspiracy?”

               

Conrado shook his head.

               

“What do I know?” he replied. “I’m just as much in the dark as you are…”

               

“Sure,” you muttered. “Twelve years in the same company, and I’m still being lied to.”

               

“It’s not that—”

               

You snapped your fingers.

               

“If you won’t tell me who evaluated me,” you reasoned, “then what’s to stop me from thinking that somehow or somewhere, I’ve been dealt with unfairly?”

               

“Look,” Conrado said, his voice faltering, “even if I knew who evaluated you, company policy dictates that authors and evaluators—”

               

You smirked.

               

“Don’t give me that corporate shit; they’ve never worked on me. I’ve strands of grey hair on my head, mind you, while in yours, I’ve yet to see any.”

               

Conrado turned pale.

               

“Company policies,” you mimicked. “You want to discuss company policies?”

               

You crossed your legs.

               

“How about the time we made a policy of bribing the whole faculty of one university just so we could capture their students as an instant market? Remember the feast we gorged them with? Porkchops, quarter pounders, and gallons and gallons of Coke Zero—you name it!”

               

Conrado’s eyes twitched.

               

“Or the time we made a policy of playing dumb when all the outsourcing jobs for the whole academic year were assigned to the children and the siblings and the friends of the top management, never mind that they were all nincompoops. Yes, nincompoops! No, I’m not done. Stop hushing me!”

               

You drew a deep breath.

               

“Twelve years, Conrado. Twelve years of Universal’s filth—all stored inside this head. Better than in any computer. So respect me enough by giving me what’s what as it is. I can handle it. Evading the truth never helped anyone. Never did and never will.”

               

Conrado piled up the dishes.

               

“Now, you’re just being irrational. And unfair,” he said. “You know we did those—things—out of desperation. And we’ve more than made up for them in time. Universal may not be perfect, but its conscience remains clean.”

               

You laughed. “Sure.”

               

Conrado shrugged his shoulders. “Whatever. It’s between you and Fermina now. I’ve done my job, and, goddammit, I don’t know why I volunteered to break the bad news to you in the first place.”

               

He showed you the way out.

               

“It’s just that maybe sometimes, Matiás, you should try to be less dramatic and more appreciative. Learn how to take things in stride. We’re supposed to watch each other’s back here. No, don’t speak. I’m no longer interested in whatever you have to say for now. Have a safe ride home.”

III

               

               

Your trip further embittered your mood. The pedestrians and the traffic enforcers you passed seemed to represent the phantom members of a secret partnership bent on blocking you from earning your place in the history of letters—each one of them an accomplice who knew the secret of your rejection and now laughed inwardly as your defeat looked irreversible and complete. Every swerve and lag on the way struck you as additional proofs that your enemies had surrounded you, and perhaps that life itself had accursed you, you the helpless victim of its malicious capriciousness, you the shaking guppy now disintegrating inside the whale’s cavernous belly.

               

You sought refuge in your thoughts. Imagining yourself standing on the stage of a bursting ampitheater, you checked the microphone and delivered the following speech:

‘To invent, Poincaré once said, is to discern, to choose. Publication, or the act of discriminating which of the works presented before a publishing house will be exposed to the public’s eye, is, therefore, an act of invention. As such, it is imbued with a set of obligations, which when not performed, will result in serious harm, an injury all the more grievous because it will affect all who can read, which is to say, the sub-populace upon whose shoulders a society’s fate depended on. What is not published, what is not chosen, remains invisible, silent, esoteric; in short, as good as dead, for a work comes into being only if it can get into contact with a mind that can potentially or actually set its ideas in motion in the workshop of its imagination. On the other hand, what is published, what is chosen, becomes visible, loud, common, that is, both accepted and acceptable, and, thus, capable of influencing public opinion.

               

‘The power to publish, as a result, is the power to control other minds. It includes the privilege of snuffing out dangerous thoughts, of doing away with unflattering conceptions. And in this country, who have we bestowed with that power and privilege, ladies and gentlemen? Who is our national superego? How sophisticated or retarded is this institution? On the one hand, you have the commercial publishing houses, who shirk from printing innovative works because what is experimental might be unappealing, and what is unappealing will never generate enough sales to recoup the expenses of publication. On the other hand, you have the academic publishing houses, who lionize the so-called literati, never mind how boring or how hollow or how inane their final products will be, never mind how the originating conditions which justified the production of a certain artistic creation in one locale are lacking here.

               

‘When a great writer enters the scene,’ you continued, ‘would these publishing houses welcome him or her, even if his or her ideas were too strange for the masses to appreciate or too indigenous for the self-styled intelligentsia to take seriously? But how is one to know? A great work, to be read, needed to get published, that is clear. But to get published, it must first sacrifice its essential individuality to the indisputable authority of a publishing house who will never deign to sell any manuscript that passed its hands without first having transformed that manuscript’s shape and substance to meet the requirements of its prejudices—or to use a less offensive term, its in-house style guide. For a publishing house to thrive, it must remain jealously conservative; but for a trailblazing work of art to be authentic, it must endeavour to be nothing less than revolutionary. Therein lies the friction,’ you concluded. ‘And the lubricant? Chance, deceit, good connections, a deep pocket—there is no clear answer, at least for now.’  

               

You shook your head as you drove up the street. Other questions troubled you, but you ignored them (Did literature still matter? Had it ever really mattered? Which portion of the public’s avowed support for the arts was a genuine expression of a real cultural appreciation, and which an empty signifier, a counterfeit gentility that perfumed a general backwardness in taste?). You relegated these to a faraway region in your mind, along with the rumors in Universal that you were abusing your influence and that your chronic migraines were most likely the symptoms of an impending dementia.

IV

Fermina led you to her office the following day. Sunlight streamed in through a large window overlooking the wide expanse of Quezon Avenue. In the middle of the room stood a glass-topped narra table strewn with account ledgers and colored print-outs of El Nido. On the bisque walls rested shelves filled with Universal Publishing, Inc.’s elementary and high school textbooks. An impressionistic painting of rice planters glowed from the back, its double matting decorated with plastic calla lilies. She motioned for you to take a seat.

               

“Don’t do it, Matiás,” her expression turning serious. “Conrado told me about your dinner yesterday… I care a lot about you and your work. Remember how I gave the marching orders to the editors when they complained about having to process your novels on top of the titles listed in their roadmap?”

               

“This is why we will never understand each other.” You shook your head. “You think I owe you some debt of gratitude. For publishing me. I’ve given you more than what my job description required even before you started investing on my pieces. I never asked for anything in return.”

               

Fermina drew the curtain.

               

“All right,” she said, her eyes locked into you. “You want the truth? Conrado told me how you bragged that you could handle it.”

               

Your frame shook.

               

“No one evaluated The Conspiracy. The bloody sales report on your titles was enough to convince me that I may have made some lapses in judgment concerning your projects.”

               

You trembled. A minute of silence passed.

               

“Give me a number,” you said.

               

“There’s no need—”

               

“I said give me a number.”

               

Fermina made a gesture of impatience.

               

“Twelve. Less than twenty units sold since 2011. And we—or should I say I, because I’m the one getting all the flak for this—published more than a thousand copies of your novels.”

               

Tears welled up in your eyes. You wiped them away.

               

“I’m not blaming you,” she consoled, after hearing you whimper. “But it’s the company’s money that’s getting wasted here and—let’s just say another failed venture will deeply hurt Universal right now.”

               

You pretended to study the dancing colors of the painting behind her. Fermina paced the room.

               

“Look, I’m not saying it’s your fault. Marketing could have done a better job. Sales could have definitely been more aggressive…”

               

You remained silent.

               

“I’m sorry, Matiás. Please believe me when I tell you that I know how you feel. I used to write too. Reams and reams of poetry. But you’ve led me on to assume too many risks already—and I’m the one the company’s holding liable, not you. What will I do with another book that won’t sell? Answer that. Place yourself in my position as your immediate superior. Then you can tell me if I’m being unfair.”

               

You rose from your seat.

               

“That’s just it, Fermie. I can’t. Now, if you don’t want The Conspiracy, I’ll just send it to some other publishing house. For me, it’s as simple as that.”

               

Fermina sighed.

               

“What I’m asking from you,” her index finger tracing a line in her forehead, “is a little consideration. Can’t your novel wait another year? If Universal makes a whopping by September, maybe we can have it published after all.”

               

A secretary knocked on the door. Fermina quickly went to his side and signed some papers.

               

“What do you think?” she asked after returning to her seat.

               

“Right now, I don’t have an opinion.”

               

“If ever, we can publish it in CD format,” the tone of her voice indicating that the dialogue had already ended. “To minimize costs. Or if you insist on having it published in print, I can order a partial recall of the unsold copies of your earlier novels and just have some of their paper recycled.”

V

You trudged up the apartment stairs. You wished that you had the audacity to confront Fermina’s implicit threat a while ago instead of having lost your heart in the way that you did. She knew you had misgivings about having your novels published in any other form aside from paper. She also knew you strongly disagreed with the prevailing notion that everything would soon go digital, and that, in time, pictures would eventually supersede the written word.

‘The image,’ you once emailed her after a heated exchange with the author of a cybernetics textbook, ‘raised into prominence by the cinema, the television, and the computer, could never displace the written word as the principal form of media. Images, while capable of quickly conveying sensory phenomenon, could hardly convey abstract ideas without overreaching their natural boundaries. They were descriptive, not suggestive. They showed what an object’s physical qualities were, but not what those physical qualities were supposed to mean. For example, take the word affection. A screenshot of lovers kissing, or of people laughing, or of a child and her puppy rolling, do convey hints of this emotion, but it can hardly accomplish what the written word can easily do, which is to contain within its being the germ of all of these images and simultaneously. The problem with images, which was not true with the written word, was that they could only function by displaying a completed situation, something that had already been made definite; the written word, however, could function as a trigger, as a key to all the potential situations its meaning embodied. In each image existed a whole argument, both thesis and proof; but in each word existed humankind’s whole repository of arguments, both what was, what is, and what could be. In short, the chief advantage of texts over pictures could be summarized into this—they could be endlessly interpreted without ever getting exhausted.’ Her terse reply stung you like a slap: ‘Got that, Mat. Thanks so much for this. Will go over it again later.’

               

You reached your unit. As you unlocked the knob, the child Ruben from next door peeked from the window and quickly drew the blinds when you caught his eye.

VI

After a brief shower, you spread your journal open, but could not write anything profound. An overwhelming ennui had engulfed you. You beat your head when you left your draft on Jose Garcia Villa’s literary theories in the same pitiable state you found it in—two half-written introductory paragraphs with a barely discernible train of thought. Hoping to derive inspiration from what you considered past successes, you turned to the dummy copies of your previous novels. You fingered their pages and relished your favorite scenes after a maternal re-reading. An hour later, you decided to call it a night and lay in your bed. The last thought that flitted in your mind before completely lapsing into unconsciousness was the empty threat you made to Fermina earlier about having your manuscript edited by the other publishing houses. You’ve already made the rounds. The rejection slips they sent you remained crumpled at the bottom of your dustbin.

VII

Fermina snuggled in her bathtub, the sweet aroma of her scented candles relaxing her nerves. She regretted the tone she had used with you today; she had no intention of sounding either cruel or insensitive. But somebody had to make you face a number of painful truths—and you were starting to grow pig-headed.

Nicolo was snoring when she entered their lime green bedroom. The lamp shade cast a soft glow on his chubby folds. He had accidentally left the television open; the Spurs were leading the Hawks, 72–63. Fermina crouched over to her personal refrigerator and poured herself a glass of rice wine. After taking her place next to her husband, she pulled out a sheaf of yellow paper from her bag. It was the latest essay you had asked her to read, your comparative study on nineteenth-century French and Philippine realism. Her fingers looked for the final pages.

               

An hour later, she broke into a smile as she turned off the light.

               

“My dear Matiás,” she said. “The silly things you come up with…”

VIII

No one seemed surprised when you went on an indefinite leave. For the next three months, you spent the bulk of your savings binging on seafood and gin. As you staggered home one night, your head throbbed harder than usual, making you lose your balance. Once on the floor, you rolled over and wept. From behind your tears, you noticed that two wide gaps yawned at the bottom level of your bookshelf.  

IX

“A mass of contradictions,” a voice proclaimed from inside your head as you lay suspended in half-consciousness. In your mind’s eye, you pictured the speaker as a young man, about twenty or twenty-two, dressed in a Henley shirt and swimming trunks, his delicate lips crowned by a two-day-old moustache. The sound of beach water lapping the shore lent a dreamy languor to his nasal intonation.

               

“Drink your lemonade, darling.”

               

“Thanks.”

               

His companion looked a few years older. She was garbed in a long summer dress, her sunglasses hanging from her neck, her arms and shoulders deliciously tanned by the vigorous Italian sun.

               

“Consider,” Angelo said as he refilled his glass, “on the one hand, he complains that because there are only two alternatives today in terms of publication—the commercial and the academic publishing houses—then original ideas cannot proliferate. But, on the other hand, he sets himself against the Internet and everything going digital. Doesn’t he realize that the way out lay exactly there?”

               

Marcela grinned. “Maybe he’s just looking for another one. He’s not satisfied.”

               

“I don’t think so,” Angelo said. “I think the poor guy’s just making an excuse.”

               

“An excuse for what?”

               

“Lack of talent, of course.”              

               

Your hands turned cold.

               

“I understand him,” Angelo continued. “His conduct makes sense to me. Some things are, well, some things are just pretty damn hard to accept. But everything becomes clear, doesn’t it? If your books don’t sell, it’s either you or the publishing house who’s to blame. The writer will never admit he’s the problem. Therefore, in his view, it must be the publishing house. It’s a bit childish, really. Something like how Nietzsche defined slave morality—except more sinister because it’s concealed. But that’s what happens when people trust writers in the first place. What can you expect from those who lied to make a living?”

               

Marcela watched the children by the shore sculpt horses in the sand.

               

“And he doesn’t want to go digital because it would refute his position.” Angelo reached for his Chinese fan. “Remember that he riles against publishing houses because he thinks that they exclude certain works or poison those which they do accept as a condition for publication. This means that if no such constraints existed, if all kinds of titles were the given the absolute license to be made public, then the world would be brimming with original ideas. But the Internet has removed those constraints and given that license. And look at what the great argument is reduced to—half of the websites working now are pornographic, if not full of gore. The other half are filled with cats and children biting their little brothers’ fingers. What’s keeping the supposedly original ideas at bay? What’s preventing them from being seen, from being read?”

               

Angelo winked. Marcela nodded.

               

“His position betrays him. Publishing houses must discriminate in the end. But to concede that would be, well, fatal to his cause. What other conclusion would then be left for him but to admit that he was just a lousy writer?”

Marcela laughed. “So are you saying that publishing houses never make mistakes?”

               

“Not at all! But just because, say, one policeman took a bribe, doesn’t mean that the whole force was rotten. Fire that corrupt bastard, for all I care. But why incriminate the rest?”

               

Marcela bought a cone of pistachio ice cream from a passing vendor.

               

“But what do you suggest that he do?”

               

“Simple,” Angelo shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun. “Write better books.”

               

You bit your lip.

               

“And if he can’t?”

               

“Then choose another career. No shame in that. Or if he had an ounce of self-respect, commit suici—”

Someone knocked on your door. Ruben shyly stepped into your room carrying a huge paper bag. You wiped the beads of sweat collecting on your brow and asked him what the matter was.

               

“I’m really sorry, Mr. Matiás. For disturbing you. I meant to return your books sooner, but I was too afraid to come.”

               

He kept his eyes glued to the floor.

               

“What books? What did I lend you?”

               

“The Three Musketeers and Caves and Shadows, sir. You left them with mama. I was supposed to return them last Tuesday, but I accidentally ripped off some of the pages. I had to tape them all back. Here.”

               

Ruben showed you the pages he fixed. Your head split. You seemed to hear the faint traces of children laughing, but you were not sure why.

               

“Water,” you said, after skipping a heartbeat. “Get me some water.”

               

Ruben opened the faucet and filled a glass.

               

“Thanks.”

               

When your vision had cleared, you got up and sat at the edge of your bed. Ruben stayed put. His presence comforted you.

               

“You like to read?” you asked him, after placing your Dumas and Joaquin on the shelf.

               

“Yes, sir.”

               

“You have a lot of books too?”

               

“No, sir. After papa got hospitalized, there’s really not much money left to buy anything else but his pills.”

               

Ruben hid behind a chair.

               

“Why?” you asked. “What happened to him?”

               

“He’s dying, sir.”

               

“How come?”

               

Ruben lowered his voice.

               

“Got into a fight with some policemen. One night, they waited for him outside his newspaper office. They beat him up with a truncheon.”

               

“But how is he now?”

               

“He’s getting better, sir.”

               

You studied the boy’s profile.

               

“And your mother?”

               

“She’s downstairs,” his eyes turning to the door. “Probably wondering where I am.”

               

You drew a deep breath.

               

“Is there anything else you need, sir?” he asked.

               

You paused.

               

“You love your father very much?”

               

Ruben smiled. “Yes, sir. I’m his superhero—his Superman. Or Batman. But not Flash! How can I beat our enemies if I just kept on running away?”

               

“None of that,” shaking your head slowly. “No melodrama.”

               

Ruben turned pale.

               

“But mama never ran away. Why should I?”

               

You gave a weak laugh.

               

“What if I told you that sometimes running away is the smart thing to do? Say, to call for reinforcements. Don’t superheroes sometimes do that? Or to wait until you became stronger.”

               

Ruben resumed his place behind the chair.

               

“I don’t know, sir. But, in that case, maybe intelligence isn’t everything.”

               

You eyed him in the dark.

               

“You’re a genius, sir. Mama always told me that,” he said. “You probably got very high grades when you were in school. And all your books are so heavy and thick. But if having a big brain was everything that mattered, then how come—then how come you still cry?”

               

Your fists tightened.

               

“We always hear you from next door, sir. These past few weeks especially…”

               

You held your breath.

“

Authors,” you said, “are generally a depressed lot.”

               

“But are all of you this sad?”

               

“No,” your throat feeling dry, “but those who are, are the ones people will remember.”

X

The cool Baguio breeze wafted into your room, tossing your papers into mild disarray. From your veranda, you could hear the leaves of the pine trees rustling whenever a motorcar sped by. The laughter of the shoppers flocking to the open-air malls and souvenir hawkers blended with the soft droning of the crickets and the flapping of migrating birds. The image of Fermina’s countenance breaking into a smile when you returned to the office filled your mind. Her surprise seemed genuine; she sent you as Universal’s delegate to an international conference on copyright infringement as a reward for finally showing up. A blank page rested on your table. You blew the tip of your pen and sat down to write. The next seminar would not begin until after an hour.

               

You have not invented all the details of your next piece yet, but you will know who your prospective readers will be. You will write a short story that will reintroduce the figure of the author into the consciousness of the public, but without the mystique that it had always been shrouded by. You will ask if literary writers had already outstayed their welcome, if they had already outlived their utility, if they had already become superfluous in the twenty-first century. You will describe this specimen of humankind as it really is—vulnerable, afraid, irrational, ambitious, unhappy. But you will refuse to take the worn-out path beaten by the classical realists. You will strive to make your style more intimate; you will tear down the artificial boundary separating storytellers from their audiences by placing whoever will read you in your position when you wrote what they have read; you will make them your main character, and your short story, at least for a few moments, their life. You will place them in your world; you will share with them your thoughts and the thoughts of the people around you. You will drop them hints on how the innovations in technology have affected your craft, how the rise of the image has put into question the potency of the written word, and how the excellence in the arts in first-world countries has stunted the development of counterpart artistic movements in your own. You will combine the elements of an epistolary, a confessional, and a narrative; you will be both conservative and modern, both magical and surreal; you will both speak and listen, both command and obey. You will choose as your main themes sadness and pain, but you will remember that where there is life, there is hope, and where there is hope, there can be happiness. You will attempt to show this story to Ruben as a proof of your creative rebirth, but out of an incorrigible sense of shyness, you never will—not even when he called you papa for the first time after you adopted him when his mother died of a stroke at her husband’s funeral; or when his eyes lit up after you bought him a brand-new encyclopedia, The Great Books of the Western World, when he graduated the salutatorian of his batch; or when you patted him on the back as his first daughter was being christened by a beer-bellied priest in a dusty cathedral in Bacolod; or when he dropped his glass of mango juice and rushed to your side when a heart attack levelled you and you whispered to his ear on the way to the hospital van that you, yes you, that you didn’t run away from your enemies too. You will dedicate this piece to all the other works of fiction in the history of letters that aimed to evoke something pure, ineffable, eternal. The first sentence dawned upon you; with bated breath, you jotted it down, the opening chord of a verbal symphony that from deep silence had suddenly burst into life, the brief exordium of a manifold revelation that like an ever-recurring dream will end in the beginning and begin in the end:

               

‘The sun bleeds over the city skyline, its dying light tinting the yacht-filled bay…

Quezon City 2015