The fires of April
If there is something that must be said about the fires of April, it is that they claimed the bulk of National Artist Francisco Arcellana’s library, more than a thousand titles including some rare editions that were transferred on Chinese New Year last February to the Faculty Center, in the early hours of April Fool’s Day when the FC was razed.
The books had been moved to the FC for cataloguing after sitting in the basement of the old ancestral homestead on Maginhawa Street UP Village for years, gathering dust and mildew and battling the elements since the passing of my father in 2002 and my mother in 2012. They were to be donated to the Arcellana Reading Room at FC, the building that housed the offices of the College of Arts and Sciences faculty back in the day, including room 1074 of the English department and 3143 of political science.
The new renters at Maginhawa, an engineering outfit that sought a base off campus where members taught, needed the space for operations, and I was tasked by my siblings to write a letter of donation to the Creative Writing Institute, so that the books would finally find a resting place and eventually benefit future generations of students of the university where my parents taught since after the war until their retirement before the turn of the century.
The turnover was scheduled on Chinese New Year of the Fire Monkey to make it auspicious, which turned out to be inauspicious come to think of it now, after the fire made us all look like monkeys clinging to memories of the beautiful letters, some of the books dating back to the Japanese Occupation, themselves a kind of timeline because the writer had the knack of writing the family address at the time a book was purchased, so the observant cataloguer would know that the family of Franz and Emy would grow slowly and change addresses from Cavite Street in Gagalangin, Tondo; Revellin and Zamora Streets in Sta. Ana, Areas 17 and 14 on UP Diliman campus and finally 49 Maginhawa where they settled after the great storm Dading blew off the roof of the sawali house on T-1422 in the mid-1960s.
Professor Lily Rose Tope, chairman of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, received the books early in the afternoon of Feb. 9 at the back parking lot of the FC. It took two trips of the engineering firm’s van to haul off the library, as well as our eldest brother Frankie’s trusty Echo that escorted the books, a number of them in the backseat of his car.
After photos were taken to document the deed of donation, and the letter duly notarized and sent to the Writing Center by courier the next day, the books were piled into the visiting professor’s vacant room on the FC first floor adjacent to the DECL office. Since the exchange prof had not yet arrived for the semester, the books would stay there for cataloguing led by one of my father’s former scholars and current faculty Francis Quina, thence to be brought to the Arcellana Reading Room for final repository on the shelves of the original site of the writing center.
Professor Lily Rose texted later that evening that the DECL was planning a tribute program in September the writer’s centennial, and she herself would slowly go over the books. I hesitated to ask her if she could look out for Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which my son had expressed an interest in reading when he saw a copy at a bookstore.
Aside from Rushdie, there were some other books I failed to locate during their last days in the old house, where the power and water were cut off before the engineers moved in: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a collection of Bay Area essays of Czeslaw Milosz, the fiction of the Cebuano writer Carlos Cortes, art criticism by John Berger, some armed forces pocket books that literally fit in pocket and with which we had a lot of fun as kids, a stash of the Fookien Times Yearbook if the termites had not gotten to them first.
Not all was lost, I’d like to think. In my last visit to the basement library in mid-January I was able to take away my last bagful of books, what I could see in the damp and dark, powerless house. The lot of them covered in my father’s favorite manila paper to make them somewhat uniform, the address of whatever waystation scrawled in his trademark cursive on the inside front.
Frank has some of the diaries, and the last of the artwork and paintings were moved to the rented house of a grandson also in UP Village. Lily Rose said that they will slowly try to rebuild the library and reading room, but for the foolish monkey fires of April that reduced the decades to ashes.
