WILFRIDO D.

NOLLEDO
AMID THE ALIEN CORN

By Quijano de Manila (Nick Joaquin)

October 1970

A CULT among the young writers.of the country is Wilfrido Nolledo, who is to
Philippine prose what Villa is to its verse.

If Villa has heightened the language of poetry to an almost angelic

incandescence, Nolledo has deepened the language of fiction to a nearapocalyptic density. For both these magi, the medium is the message. A Villa
poem itself informs the clairvoyance required to behold it; every story by
Nolledo recreates a reader into its reader in the same way that not everyone
could see a Picasso until the body of Picasso's work had developed in the
public a new eye with which to view it. It sounds incredible now, but what
have become the classic Hemingway stories were found unreadable by the
editors he first sent them to. Nolledo underwent a similar experience. His
prose was found dazzling all rightbut what the hell was the guy saying?

An original from the start, a Melchizedek sprung from no ascertainable

parentage, Nolledo has baffled with his labyrinths, where a Theseus may
sense not one but a herd of minotaur: Joyce and jazz and basketball and the
cinema Old Spain and the kanto-boy Manila... So one might begin to tag the
influences.. Godard and Antonioni and Fellini and Bergman would have to be
specified; Eliot, too, and the gothic Henry James; and the rituals of Philippine
folk Catholicism. The prose will sometimes bellow with beer, though the
references are to wine, Spanish or rice.

But what always results from all this is Nolledo, always peculiarly himself: a
method in his madness, a cunning even in his most delirious dithyrambs. The
Nolledo labyrinth is baroque, but at the heart of it is a coziness of open space

where at a simple table sits a man with wife and children eating supper under
the stars.

A local cult within a decade after he began writing, Nolledo has now, at 37,
stepped before the international audience. Out this month in New York,
published by E. P. Dutton & Company, is Nolledos first novel, "But For The
Lovers," where the young magus of language has turned the Philippine war
experience into a poem. It's a beautifully printed book, running to 316 pages,
and it begins with a prologue that begins with a paragraph that begins with a
sentence that are like no beginning you'd ever expect of a war novel.

Listen:

"He was beginning to eat flowers and the crescent moon was in his eyes
when he awoke again. One night long ago when they had intercepted a code
from the enemy on the shortwave and had not needed him anymore, they
pulled out their tents, mantled him with leaves and left him. They left him a
rifle, a buri basket and a book of psalms, for the Major had decreed in
defense of the murderer: Let the little Legionnaire lie here and die; it is
written, it shall be read. But the boy went on sleeping: and did not die and
when he awakened it was to see (it was to find himself alone) a bird, a whitewinged maya dart in from the west, perhaps headed for the monsoon.
Steadying the Springfield, he cocked the hammer with a quivering thumb,
and waited. It flew away, whatever it was, and now he squinted up and
remembered that it was the first time in a long spell he had seen the sky, and
he thought: It is longer, lonelier and lovelier than any of my prayers. He
sighted the nimbus-an eagle in captivity-and fired.

"Lord, he said, I am punching holes in your garret."

After that, one should quote the blurb on the books jacket:

"But For The Lovers marks the debut of a strongly original voice in
contemporary fiction. This extraordinary novel is no less remarkable for the
power and beauty of its' language than for the exotic and magical world it

creates. Set in the Philippines during the Second World War, But For The
Lovers depicts the survival of a group of Filipinos during the Japanese
Occupation and American liberation.

"An old mail who used to wander the countryside entertaining children, a
young girl raped by Japanese soldiers and a ha1f-caste all huddled together in
the slums of Manila their eyes fastened on the sky and the sea. At night
guerrilla messengers bring word of the coming of the American Army to drive,
away the Japanese invaders. This is the beginning of a new novel whose
surface story only suggests the invention and history that awaits the reader.
The cast of characters is enormous, ranging from a half-mad prisoner to a
Japanese major who views the war as the first step in the liberation of the
Asian people from Western civilization. There is an American pilot shot down
by the Japanese who falls in love with the young girl, an amazing keeper of a
boardinghouse who spends her life planning the seduction of the old man.

"Not for years has there been a novel so teeming with life, so rich and
complex in language, history, mythology."

Even as blurbs go, that one is a blitz. A more objective advance opinion is
offered by the trade journal Publisher's Weekly, which ran a pre-publication
notice on the Nolledo novel:

"This is a strange, compelling book that has the tortuous complexity and is
fraught with the labyrinthine terrors of a dream. It is difficult to convey the
full flavor of this novel, its combination of the real and surreal that becomes
almost hypnotic. The place is Manila during the Japanese Occupation.
Everyone is waiting for the coming of the rescuing Americans. Cabals,
assassinations abound. The focus is on Ojos Verdes, a boarding house
'creeping with exotica,' in which everyone seethes with collective and
individual rage. The cast of characters ranges from the intellectual Japanese
commander of a prison camp, to a nameless girl, a war orphan, a strange old
man. The lame, the halt and the blind are all here, but grotesque as they are,
they are treated with reverence. Serious review attention can be expected."

However his book may fare on the market and with the critics, Nolledo has
advanced the cause of expression in the Philippines and in the classic if

melancholy tradition of epochal Philippine books (the Rizal novels, the Villa
poems) published in terra aliena.

The expatriate writer is still our culture hero.

DING, as family and friend call Wilfrido Nolledo, is a Manila boy, born and
bred in the tough district of Balic- Balic. He high-school'd at San Beda,
finished the fourth year at National University, moved on to Santo Tomas for a
Lit. B. and a graduate course. His college, the Philets, was then famed as a
breeding ground for writers, having produced such lights as Johnny Tuvera,
Sionil Jose, Johnny Gatbonton, Rolando Tinio and Jose Flores. On the pontifical
campus Ding was a shy quiet boy, a loner, but he did get to be literary editor
fIrst of the Philets magazine, Blue Quill and then of the university organ, The
Varsitarian. His post on Blue Quill was taken over by a slim cool girl named
Blanca Datuin, whom Ding began to fancy. At 15, Ding broke into print with a
report on the; Cabanela-Anduha fight for The Sporting World; at 20, emerged
as a fictionist with a series of short stories-. "Sun." "Veronica" and "Carnival"
in the Chronicle weekly magazine; then won the top prize in the 1954 Marian
Year literary contest with "The Beginning." But the Nolledo cult actually began
with his prizewinners in the Free Press short story contest: "Maria
Concepcion (second prize, 1959); "Kayumanggi, Mon Amour" (third prize,
1960); "Rice Wine" (first prize, 1961); and "The Last Caucus (first prize,
1963). In these stories the Nolledo style has already developed its
characteristic density. He won three third prizes in the Palanca Contest (1960,
61, 62) and six prizes for his one-act plays, one of which, Turn Red the
Sea, was the top winner for 1963.

In 1959, two years after her graduation, he married Blanca Datuin, they
eventually set up house on an alley off Tayuman aptly named Makata: the
poet lived on Poet Street. He joined the Free Press staff in 1964, turned from
teetotaller into beer drinker, did the movie write-ups and such memorable
articles as an expose on North Harbor and a report on Manilas nightlife. In
1966 he left for the United States on a fellowship to the Writers Workshop of
Iowa University.

This October, three years after he started it, "But For The Lovers" appeared in
New York, the first book from one Filipino writer who looks to be fecund and
durable.

THE NOVEL, "But For The Lovers," has the feel of the picaresque, a vagabond
manner established by its prologue, where a fantastic trio-an American
soldier, a native girl, a Japanese sailor-wander through the nightmare
landscapes of war. Soldier and sailor are killed, the girl shoots down their
killers, then is floated 'away "on a piece of house," weeping and singing: "0
Quasimoto-San, I long for your treason. . .

The novel proper, though cored round a boarding- house in Manila, likewise is
ambulant with rogues and innocents "drifting around like sleepwalkers." They
range a various geography.

Item: Hidalgo de Anuncio, a Castilian relic of road-show vaudeville, once a

great clown, now merely the non-top banana on the burlesque stage of
wartime Manila. Nolledo here amazingly recreates the atmosphere of
decayed vaudeville and in the absurd figure of Hidalgo de Anuncio
interweaves backstage vulgarity and well-bred nostalgia, Quiapo and
Intramuros.

Item: The Hidalgo's scabrous houseboy Molave Amoran (the names in the
book have an amusing grotesquerie), a "night mammal. . . bred from four
generations of squatter-scavengers in Tondo," thief' and hustler and hunter of
urban game: "Amoran loved Manila. It was his territory. Especially at night of
full moon and scrawny cats and dogs. Those animals' habits he timed to the
second, knowing exactly where to locate them at a given hour, how large a
group was loose Meat was the thing and the Chinese cooks who operated
Manilas fringe panciterias never asked questions.

Item: Tira Colombo, landlady of the boardinghouse on Calle Ojos Verdes three
times widowed, still a voracious feeder on male meat, of which she can have
her fill from those of her boarders who are behind in rent and are willing to
pay in kind: "The Sperm Count as of this morning was fifty-fifty. Four
probables (two bachelors, two common-law husbands) were remaindered for
active duty during the holidays. Qualitatively, at least one of these possessed
physical assets negotiable in A-I fornication . . .Her bulbous nose could sniff
out a man's genitals in a suit of armor." But it's her genteel tenant in Room
13, Hidalgo de Anuncio, that landlady Tira Colombo is most in a rut to get to

her basement bed. Tira Colombo is Nolledo's earth goddess: "Her wicker chair
was set down in room thirteen. Like an Ethiopian high priestess en route to
the temple, the landlady had been borne up the stairs ' by her attendants
('maids in wailing') who, dusky and stolid, resembled Babylonian slaves
ransomed to imperial service. Paying tenants peeled out their doors for a
glimpse of their mistress (plumped up by feather cushions) . . . The Colombo
runners returned, their reina gesticulating with fly-swatter. Singing with
spears in their lungs, they pounced upon the wicker throne, bearing Tira the
Terrible aloft . . . She was First Female, the Woman of the Seig, neur (though
Hidalgo did not know it), Queen of the Scavengers, sarap-sarap!
Item: A sick girl whom Hidalgo de Anuncio finds on Avenida Rizal and takes
back to his room at Ojos Verdes, where, on awaking from a long sleep, she
relates to an assembly the wondrous adventures of her picaresque life. She
is, it turns out, the girl in the prologue. And the Philippine symbol? "Neither
an Hidalgo nor a Shikura, given all the time and giving back tyranny, would
leave one, mark on her that she would not somehow shed like a molting skinbeing as she was that most irreducible grade of human a snake ever turned
to. "What's .her name? "Nei ther Brooklyn's bravado nor the promise of New
York will take you out of the corn fields." But what's her name? "As long as
she was a dryad among demons on pontoon bridges, as long as she was a
decibel in the drum roll of the U.S. Cavalry, as long as she was a cricket in the
crusts of Intramuros, and as long as she was Mandarin eyes and Malayan hair
among benzedrine masks and blond cornucopia. . . " Maria Alma. Virgin Soul.

Item: The boardinghouse: "creeping with exotica, its life source delineated,
by somnambulistic mammalia - whose chief accent is the Scream, whose
obsession is Survival at any price."

Nolledo has made that boardinghouse an image of the panic world of warcrazed Manila and the various streams of consciousness that wash through it,
glinting with bits of history, swell at last into a tide of racial memory.

At books climaxFebruary, the month of Aquarius- the Liberation is

thundering fatally (Boom! Boom! Boom!) over Manila and Tira Colombo has
finally made it to Room 13, is trying to rape Hidalgo de Anuncio, but can't
coax a hard on. "Perhaps a little loving bite? Boom! Boom! Boom!

The head carne off; a ligament stuck in her incisor left." As the boardinghouse
explodes to American fire. When the ruins are dug up six months later, the
clean-up detail un- earth: "one incredibly intact pair of Spanish cojones (as
though left in preservatives); a soprano's dehydrated tonsils (to be mistaken
for pig liver); and a woman's bacterial breast (siliconed with worms)."

As you can see, "But For The Lovers" is an outrageous book. It's very funny
and savage and grim and beautiful. It has a long uproarious passage on
jacking off that out-Portnoys the Complaint and an equally hilarious chapter
on a. nude tango contest where the winner is the last male to come. .

The style is a sustained audacity. Though the language is heightened to the

level of poetry, the narrative is readable tale, the action an excitement. A
critic once said, apropos D. H. Lawrence, that realism in the modern novel
should be a bush recognizably real but on fire. In Nolledo, as in Lawrence, the
bushes are for real-and every bush burns.