Voyager’s excellent journey

The much-awaited collected works of Jose “Butch” Dalisay has come to fruition in a handsome book called Voyager and Other Fictions, published by Anvil. The collection comes with a comprehensive introduction by Dr. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo. A hefty volume at 500 pages, it compiles the 43 stories that Dalisay has written from 1975 to the present. The lovely cover design was done by Jordan Santos. Critics describe Dalisay as “one of the masters of Filipino fiction in English” – and this book shows us why.

In his introduction, the author said, “While creative nonfiction occupies most of my time in retirement, largely for a living, nothing exhilarates me more than writing fiction – not the novel, for which I never mustered anything resembling affection, but the short story, which I find both exacting and exciting in its compactness.”

I have read all of the short stories in Voyagers, except the new ones at the end that form part of Dalisay’s novel-in-progress. They are good on first reading and better on second reading. Collected here are the early stories in Oldtimer, including the memorable title story that belongs to the vein of fiction about expatriate Filipinos in the tradition of Carlos Bulosan and Bienvenido N. Santos.

There is also the poignant “Cameo” as well as the playful “The Mirror”, along with the Palanca prize-winning “Heartland,” set in the early days of the brutal American occupation of the Philippines. It is a story that astonished my first-year students at the Ateneo for the fineness of its craft and the bleakness of its vision. ”Sarcophagus” is also here, a well-wrought tale about the tombstone that has become an academic’s life, ranged against the boisterous protest rally at his university. The  delightful “Wok” is here again, as well as the breezy “Bali Story” that seemingly reads like a harmless traveler’s tale.

The other familiar stories here are “Except Feliza,” which subtly satirizes our penchant for social climbing; “Ybarra,” which diagnoses the life of a doctor by day and a dirty, old man by night; and “At the Book Launching,” a shrewd tale about ignorant members of the culturati. This last story shows the heart of emptiness that lies at the core of the writer, whose book is ironically being launched that day.

“Dessert” is a story of seduction between a Marxist professor and his hopelessly bourgeois female student. They meet again and try to bring each other to bed between mouthfuls of the richest Black Forest cake.

Dalisay spent a month at the writer’s retreat in Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and came back with a treasure trove of stories. Amongst them is “We Global Men,” in which a Filipino in Scotland – neither waiter nor menial hand – smugly reflects on the comforts of his upper-middle-class life. Part of Asia’s rising business class, he is in Edinburgh to close another business deal. On a slow day he goes to the fair and stumbles upon a stack of postcards labeled “The Orient, Etc.” The protagonist picks up a photograph of three brown women taken in Manila, the Philippine Islands, on 14 November 1910.

There are several keys being turned here now, one of which is the tag of “Orient,” the old, discarded, and colonialist term for the vast and unknown continent of Asia which the Westerners coveted. Another is the photograph as emblematic of frozen lives, captured as it were by the male gaze. But vividly, Dalisay shows us how it is to be a Filipino in a foreign land. Even with your expensive suit, your liquid accents, and your wallet with its wad of cash, you will still be a second-class, or even a third-class citizen. It all just depends on who your former colonial master was.

Dalisay widens the sweep of his postcolonial lens with the title story, “Voyager.” It is a short novel that’s a masterly homage to Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer. There is even a sly wink to Conrad at the end. The novella brings us back to the 19th century, before the tide of history turned against the Spaniards. The characters are diverse: Farolan, the governor-general’s hatchet man; Meliton Gimenez, the young man consumed by thoughts of the revolution; and Nervez, the “I” persona upon whom the novella pivots. These are the three characters that triangulate this brew of suspense on the high seas.

Certainly one of Dalisay’s best stories is “Penmanship,” which was the title story of a lovely collection published by Cacho Publishing and designed by the poet Ramon “Rayvi” Sunico. It is one of the most moving stories I have read. It is bittersweet and poignant, leaving you with a pang of pain similar to that left by James Joyce’s short story, “Eveline,” or Charlie Chaplin’s silent film, City Lights.

Like the author, the main character has a penchant for fountain pens.

”It wasn’t him but the pen, gliding across the foolscap, filling in the vastness of the page with words that may not have meant all that much but which looked beautiful because of the personality  and the infinite variety of their shape.”

Then a young, blind woman – cool and self-possessed – begins to work in his office, seemingly being trained to take over his post once he retires. Weeks later, they have become friends and she asks him to pen a letter to her former boyfriend, who has abandoned her. It is a proud letter, and the man dutifully writes it down for her, even if in the silent air, his heart is beginning to break.

And when he goes home that night, something has already changed inside him. No longer is he the emotionally barren man reminiscent of Mr. Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Remains of the Day. No longer is he the man who only lived the life of the mind, ecstatic over T.S. Eliot’s poetry about ruins. Listen.

“The Parker Vacumatic glinted in the room light, poised to strike. It was ringed with bands of gold, and promised a wealth of words. The merest pressure on its nib could deepen an emotion.”

So very much like this excellent collection of stories.

Voyager and Other Fictions is available at National Book Store branches and online at www.anvilpublishing.com and www.nationalbookstore.com as well as in Shopee for P499.

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