The late, great Nick Joaquin is an institution at the court of famous Filipino writers. Designated as a Filipino National Artist for Literature, Joaquin produced a multitude of writings, the choice among them being his 1950 exploration of a family in the throes of personal and social transformation, “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes.”
In his memorialized play, Joaquin does not make vague or capricious allusions to the mantle of confounding transition. Rather, he digs in and makes quite clear that change, raw and frightening as it may be for the Philippine moneyed strata and other more impermeable Filipinos, is compulsory as death and taxes are.
Philippine history constitutes an important concern in “A Portrait.” The play is set in Manila’s Intramuros section in October 1941, several weeks before the war in the Pacific began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This is a period in which two sisters, Paula and Candida Marasigan, and their artist-father Don Lorenzo Marasigan, endure a family drama of what seems to be mainly of their own making.
On top of that drama is the Marasigan sisters’ struggle with a country that is being remade around them. For one thing, war was coming even as Candida and Paula continued to cling desperately to a fading way of life. As Joaquin wrote, “Outside, the world was hurrying gaily toward destruction” while in the Marasigan household
“life went on as usual; unaltered, unchanged;
everything in its proper place; everything just
the same today as yesterday, or last year, or a
hundred years ago.”
The narrative presented by Joaquin in “Portrait” reflects the latitude and dynamism of Philippine history. The play, as are the Marasigans, is embedded in a cultural, nationalistic, economic, and aesthetic interregnum wedged between two colonial paradigms: the Spanish and the American.
On a parochial level, “Portrait” is about power plays among relations and petty disputes over private property with the participants interchanging roles as judge and jury, plaintiff and defendant. Reflexively, Joaquin’s opus bumps up against the old adage that blood is thicker than water. Ironically, one of the cohesive aspects of “Portrait” is its theatrical voice of familial dysfunction.
Going on the author’s trajectory, it becomes gnawingly obvious as you go through the play that the members of the once-affluent and respected Marasigan family are doomed to be marginalized subjects as the era of their wealth and prominence winds down. Paula, Candida, and their reclusive father Don Lorenzo appear to be in denial of it all. But as any fatalist would have it, you cannot stop what is coming.
Which brings us to a physical centerpiece of “Portrait,” a depiction on canvas of Don Lorenzo done by none other than the Marasigan paterfamilias himself. The artwork, aptly titled after the play itself, excites in equal parts the intellect and the imaginations of its beholders. But for the artist’s part, the painting resonates as his existential swansong for the aging Don Lorenzo as he contemplates suicide.
One member of the composition’s captive audience is Tony Javier, a paying guest in the Marasigan household. Joaquin describes Javier as “about twenty-seven, very masculine, and sardonic.” Joaquin doesn’t stop there, adding with a mellow descriptiveness that “his shirt and tie are blissfully resplendent; his charm, however, is more subtle---and he knows it.”
Javier’s character infuses “Portrait” with broader meaning than just being a licentious spirit renting a room in the Marasigan house. From the moment he sets his eyes on Don Lorenzo’s painting, Javier has visions of fortune dancing in his head. He wastes little time in trying to convince the reluctant Marasigan sisters to sell it in the hope that he would receive a lucrative commission for having found a buyer.
As the fire of a mind-blowing windfall and consequently a fresh start in life burns for Javier, his pecuniary angle threatens to upset the valuable painting’s static essence of what Joaquin deems as “classic simplicity”:
“What flowing lines, what luminous colors,
what a calm and spacious atmosphere!
One can almost feel the sun shining and
the seawinds blowing! Space, light, cleanliness,
beauty, grace.”
Marasigan family acquaintance Bitoy Camacho, much like Nick Joaquin himself did, implicitly waxes nostalgic about the cultural legacy of Spanish colonialism. This sentiment comes on the heels of Joaquin’s aforementioned breezy fragment of classic simplicity, something that is being forsaken for a new political and materialistic reality represented in part by Tony Javier. The omnipresent painting serves as Bitoy’s doleful medium:
“Suddenly, there in the foreground, those
frightening faces, those darkly smiling faces---
like faces in a mirror...And behind them, in the
distance, the burning towers of Troy.”
The ostensible trustees of the Marasigan home are the two sisters Paula and Candida. But the fact of the matter is that both siblings cannot ably manage the upkeep for the long-standing family dwelling. Hence, their need for financial relief from relatives and from the roomer Javier. Much of Candida’s and Paula’s inability to responsibly run the property rests in denial as they avoid facing the real and likely potential for the deracination of practically everything important they’ve known growing up under their father’s patronage.
As the world closes in on them, the sheltered sisters remain stubborn if angst-ridden in being bonded to the way things have been for so long in the Marasigan ethos. Brushing off these time-honored mindsets, habits, and values in the interest of change is no modest proposition for Candida and Paula.
But life is cruel and unrelenting in its forward march. No one knew this better than Nick Joaquin who bore witness to his beloved Philippines as it endeavored to come of age as a modern nation. As a means of reassuring his readers/audience that change can be renewing as it is daunting and extirpative, Joaquin provides them with a glimmer of optimism toward the end of “Portrait.”
Ultimately though, it is with a brief and lively episode in Philippine history that Joaquin shows a Filipino family, finding itself grasping for the lost promise of earlier days, having to accept what is no longer to be expected in an ever-fluctuating linear temporality.
ALLEN GABORRO
Comments
Post a Comment