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The Past as Prologue

(Published in the Philippine Star, July 2001; Winner of the Grand Prize, Fresh Ink Writing Competition, July 2002)

The Jai-alai building has finally kissed its art deco gutters. Maan’s carinderia still (somewhat) reigns supreme. And my girlfriend’s octogenarian former landlady is either dead or missing—abducted by green, scaly, lanky, eight-footers that came down through a shaft of light, neighbors say.

It is always nice to be welcomed back by these.

Homecoming to one’s alma mater (and its romanticism, imagined or not) and being met with changes, have the effect of having one’s head ducked into a pail of warm water. Such changes lend themselves a strange, surreal feel about them: Is that pile of rubble really the old Sky Room? Is Adamson really on the wave of the New Economy? Or am I the only one warped by time, forever trapped in notions that found themselves extinct without my knowing? In this day and age, often I find truer are Borges’ and Kafka’s verbal nightmares, or Jessica Zafra’s intellectual masturbations that border on the, well, twisted.

Maybe because I haven’t really left the university long enough for fragments of my memory to squabble among themselves, arguing over which is about reality or not. It has only been a measly two years, half of that spent working for an Internet start-up that had its office within the university’s five-kilometer radius. Two years—yet now, I seem to have that certain air of superiority, the kind those old sages, with glazed eyes, tell the young ones, “There, there. It won’t really hurt. Imagine it was just an ant biting you.” I trudged the Falcon Walkway with this freshman, T-square slung on his shoulder, and stifled a compelling urge to tell him how it was seven, eight years ago—how we were in those distant, halcyon days, and quite pretentiously, how we would be in the foreseeable future. I wanted telling him that in the real world, as Laurence Fishburne would have said in the film The Matrix, people do not use T-squares.

I would be glad to tell a story. After all, I spent six years weaving them, masquerading myself as an editor of the Adamson Chronicle, the student paper. I would have told the kid that I stumbled into Adamson University by way of a laughable accident. I really had no idea about schools’ academic reputation, and while I was walking along Taft, uncertain whether to tell my mother that I would rather plant camote in Leyte than squeeze myself into this overwhelming, little understood city—when I saw the curious little painted facade with the university’s name carved on it. To me, the word “Adamson” sounded good—it sounded like big bucks, fragrant things, pretty girls who blush when you wink at them. It sounded like a foreign land.

A year later, I would feel stupid for being taken in by the name. I would later learn about the university’s bloody reputation, about fraternity wars and murders, and professors selling out–all of this juxtaposed with the fact that Adamson is supposed to be a catholic institution. Here, heathens and gentiles are off-limits; thou shall not enroll here with your foreskin intact.

But then I joined the student paper. Then I decided, overnight, that I wanted to change the world—to see to it that the system within the campus was free from all phantoms of corruption. I was sucked into the vortex of the prevailing culture: that to be an activist, no matter how politically incorrect or obsolete, was the in thing. Publish not a single tirade in the paper and people would whisper among themselves, “He’s probably gay.” Or a tuta. Tuta ng pasismo. Never mind that nobody really knew what the hell fascism meant. Who knew? Maybe we really needed a tyranny, not an American-styled democracy. Maybe what we really needed was a true-to-the-bone fascist regime—after all, most countries that were fascist ones are superpowers now, while third world countries that aped America’s democracy still find themselves uncertain about which lever to pull and who to blame.

But in those days, I was really caught up in an intense self-righteous indignation. We wanted change, and those of us in the student paper felt that the only right thing to do was attack the representatives of decadence: the school administrators themselves, the Vincentians. Some of my colleagues would take to the streets and join the fashionable activist crowd and buy those black t-shirts with the words “Serve The People” silk-screened in embossed textile paint, and feel good for being so brave and enlightened and young and, perhaps, selfless.

Sic semper tyrannis!

We were naive, yet we were sincere. We would spend nights foregoing sleep just to complete another piece of propaganda (but in those days propaganda had a name; it was called “opinion”). We were convinced we were actually serving the people. We thought that the power that oppressed us was a great hydra, which would only be beheaded by our collective rage.

But now, in moments of dark honesty, I sometimes tell myself, “well, we did it to create chaos.” That the powers-that-be was not even a hydra but an amoeba; the university president as just another jelly-filled pseudopod—powerless, a victim of the mere role he had to play. In rare moments of candor, I tell myself sic semper tyrannis my ass; it was not about saving the people, it was about me, me, me. After all, as Peanuts creator Charles Schultz said, “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

But I remain unrepentant. It’s part of growing up, in the same sense that the priest who now solemnly places on your tongue the holy wafer had, once in his fusty adolescent past, jerked off in his dank and dark room by the good grace of the almighty pornographic muse. The disturbing part, however, is to see these kids get sucked into the same vortex, believe in the same beliefs, and to finally realize that the world hopelessly runs on the proverbial treadmill. Amen.

            But maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s just something else. A few years ago I would be brazen enough to declare that I have the answer. Now the same finger that I once used to point at the faults of others recoils in hesitation. Perhaps the one who holds the truth is not even born yet. Or he may have already been born, but a ten-wheeler truck had run him over on San Marcelino the day before yesterday. Sometimes things arrive too late.

Meanwhile, there are memories. And despite or because of my disappointments or frustrations with the university (I never even attended my graduation rites), I’d still honestly say that, during the years of my stay, it cradled bitter-sweet memories I would probably never find anywhere else. The choice has always been mine to make. The freshman who walks with me now may soon find out that it is still his call; that no matter what university you are in, no matter what system, you are still the one who calls the shots. The greatest risk, anyway, is not to take it.

Now the freshman asks me about the buildings. Well, to our right is the Saint Therese with its fin-de-siecle eccentricities (beware of the guards; they sometimes bite). To our left is the old Saint Vincent building, on top of which is the student paper’s Penthouse, a little room where little kids once wielded blunderbusses and pissed on the terrace walls and scraped together a little student magazine they put out once in a blue, melting moon...

                        Copyright (c) 2004 by Joe Bert G. Lazarte