MODULE III

POSTMODERNISM IN LITERATURE

PREPARED BY: MICHAEL B. MOLINA

INTERTEXTUALITY

The poet John Donne once wrote that "no man is an island," and for postmodernists,
no text is an island. Postmodernism is all about the connections between texts, including the
various ways in which one text references another (or many others). There are all kinds of
techniques that authors can use in order to highlight these links, including pastiche, parody,
quotes, and direct references, as well as subtler nods to other material. What these techniques
have in common is that they're examples of intertextuality.
Julia Kristeva coined the term "intertextuality" in 1966, explaining that there are two
relationships going on whenever we read a text: there's the relationship between us and the
author (the horizontal axis) and between the text and other texts (the vertical axis). It's the
vertical axis that gives us our definition of intertextuality; still, both axes emphasize that no text
exists in a bubble and that we need to recognize how existing works shape current texts and
readings.
Intertextuality feeds into some of the big questions about literature—e.g., can a text be
seen in isolation or do we need to look at how it relates to other texts? For postmodernists, it's
clear that no text exists in isolation and that works of literature can only be created using stuff
that already exists. Looking at it from this perspective, then, intertextuality is unavoidable:
postmodern authors may enjoy drawing attention to it but it's always there. As the theorist
Roland Barthes sums up, a text is "a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none
of them original, blend and clash".
Another question that's been discussed a lot over the years is whether the author is in full
control of the text, or whether the reader plays an active role. On the one hand, it's the author
who weaves together this collection of intertextual references; however, we as readers make a
mental connection. This act involves recognizing conventions (academic types call these
"codes") and is something we do naturally: when we read or view any kind of text, it goes into
our memory bank and shapes our responses to other texts.
Whatever form it takes, intertextuality treats literature as a network and invites us to pick
up on how a text relates to other texts. This textiness sets postmodernism apart from some other
literary movements that are all about realism and naturalism. Postmodernism doesn't try to
disguise that a text is a construct, and that's why intertextuality is so postmo2dern—it reminds us
of the very thing that some other kinds of texts try to keep under wraps.

METAFICTION

Here's a term that gets tossed around quite a bit.

First used by William H. Gass in a 1970 essay, "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction," the
word "metafiction" signals the kind of text that emphasizes its status as a text. Metafiction is
100% aware of the fact that it's fiction—some literature may try to be naturalistic or realistic, but
postmodernism doesn't hide what it is.
In fact, it flaunts it.
Metafiction is a prime example of the self-aware vibe we often find in postmodernism.
Rather than trying to pass itself off as a window on the world and disguise its structure and
techniques, metafiction lays its cards on the table. There are lots of different ways in which
authors can create this effect—story-within-a-story, making obvious references to storytelling
conventions—but what they have in common is that they call attention to the processes of
writing and reading.
This technique started to attract attention in the 1960s when it was used in some classic
texts such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. It then reached the height of its popularity in the '70s,
though some authors (such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace) kept using it in
spades. Fast forward to the present, and metafiction has spread out much wider, becoming a
major part of pop culture.
Through its references to literary styles and conventions, metafiction gives us another
example of postmodernism's bric-a-brac approach. Postmodern literature isn't about creating
something 100% new and real—remember, these ideals are no longer seen as possible by
postmodernists. Rather than fighting against this, though, postmodernists go with the flow and
embrace the idea of writing stories about stories, instead of getting bogged down in a quest for
what's authentic or real.
P.S. As an add-on to the concept of metafiction, Linda Hutcheon came up with the term
"historiographic metafiction" in 1988. The term describes fictional texts that bring history into
the mix—a combo that takes us away from the idea of history as fact and highlights that writers
can put their own spin on things (after all, it's history we2're dealing with here).

PASTICHE

Think of pastiche as the literary equivalent of a collage: it's not about creating something
from scratch but drawing on what already exists. (Yeah, those Bachelor contestants know what's
up.) There are all sorts of ways in which texts can reference other texts, right? But what a
pastiche does is imitate other texts or genres. It's like playing dress up: a text may take on the
guise of a hard-boiled detective novel, a Gothic melodrama, a spy adventure…take your pick.
The postmodern author doesn't even have to choose just one—they can mimic as many genres as
they like.
People sometimes get pastiche and parody mixed up, since they're both examples of
intertextuality and relying on our knowledge as readers: we can't recognize parody or pastiche in
action unless who know what they're referencing. But parody usually exaggerates and pokes fun
at the original material. Pastiche, meanwhile, adopts the stylings of the original but doesn't
comment on or make fun of the material (if anything, it's more likely to pay tribute).
As with postmodernism in general, not everyone is in love with the idea of pastiche—
Fredric Jameson famously called it pointless and empty. Despite its critics, though, pastiche is a
super-popular technique in postmodern texts and can be found in all areas of pop culture. Think
Quentin Tarantino movies: they imitate a bunch of genres, like kung fu, grindhouse, and western
movies; and dime store pulp novels.
So if you're reading or watching something and it seems like it's a hodgepodge of different
genres, you can put your money on pastiche.

MAXIMALISM

Where minimalism is all about making things neat, tidy, and low key, maximalism goes
against the grain by embracing excess. And for many postmodernists, maximalism is where it's
at.
Because postmodernism doesn't stick to any hard and fast rules, its texts can be any length. Still,
some of its best-loved texts tend to be on the long side (coughDFWcough), and it's usually
maximalism that's to blame—er…thank? Postmodernists just love to describe stuff.
And it's not just lengthy descriptions that create these 800-page tomes. These authors also
tend to, um, go off on tangents. Postmodernism definitely doesn't stick to traditional ideas about
plotting and narrative structure, which means authors are more likely to take diversions and
explore other themes and subplots that tickle their fancy.
As with so many postmodern characteristics, maximalism gives the author the chance to
experiment. Since we're living in an age in which the line between authentic and inauthentic has
become blurred (so say the pomos), we may as well just throw everything into the mix rather
than getting bogged down with what's real/false or certain/uncertain.
Postmodernism's love of intertextuality and metafiction adds to its maximalist character.
It's inevitable if you think about it: if an author is making loads of references to other texts—and
to itself as a text—then we're most likely dealing with a work of maximalist fiction. In fact,
maximalism is pretty blatant about including heaps of outside info and references.

IRONY

Irony isn't exclusive to postmodernism, but the pomos just own it. Before we dive in, take
a look at Shmoop's definition of irony, paying closest attention to verbal irony. It's kind of like
sarcasm…just fancier. Irony can be playful, or it can be used to highlight the absurdity or
severity of serious situations.
Yep, it's a multitasker.
By the 1990s, irony had exploded onto the pop culture scene. In fact, it had become so
popular that it seemed to have lost its impact—people even started talking about the end of irony,
especially in the immediate wake of 9/11. For some, irony seemed to have no place following the
very real horror of this tragedy. As guys like Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller had shown in
response to WWII, though, irony can always be an effective literary device: it may lay low for a
while, but it always returns.

HYPERREALITY

While some authors and theorists welcomed postmodernism with open arms, others have
argued that it's not all fun and games. Guy Debord wrote an influential book called The Society
of Spectacle (1967), in which he flagged the downsides of a world in which the media had
seemingly invaded every corner of society. His conclusion was that we're now living in a society
in which nothing's real anymore: "All that once was directly lived has become mere
representation."
Deep.
Jean Baudrillard was another guy who held this outlook, expanding on it inSimulacra
and Simulation (1981). For Baudrillard, postmodernism wasn't just about experimental art and
fiction: he focused on the 20th-century background in which it had developed, arguing that
media and consumer culture had gone into overdrive and led to a Matrix-style scenario where
there's no originality left and what seems real is just a simulation.
Rather than embracing the postmodern age, Baudrillard saw its speed and its blurring of
real/unreal as having had a damaging effect. According to this guy, we've become so bombarded
with images that we've lost touch with reality and, what's more, mistake these images, or
"simulacra," forreality. The result? Life may seem real but it's no longer really real—we're now
living in a state of hyperreality.
Trippy, right?
Though Baudrillard puts a negative spin on things, his theory has its roots in one of the
big ideas behind postmodernism, which is that there's nothing original left so say and no story
that hasn't been told. Words like originality and authenticity used to have a lot of street cred, but
for postmodernists, nothing's truly original anymore. In this view, art and literature are created
by reworking existing texts and ideas.
Postmodernism usually doesn't sweat this lack of authenticity or concepts like "reality" and
"truth." Its attitude is pretty much "so what?"—it takes it as a given and works from there. But
there were some folks who weren't too happy about this turn of events. So is postmodernism a
thrill or is it the demise of civilization?
You be the judge.

PARANOIA

For all its playfulness, postmodern literature also deals with heavy stuff—including
paranoia. Yep, these people thought someone was out to get them.
Okay, we need to take social and historical background into account here. Remember,
postmodernism grew out of a mid-late 20th-century setting in which technology, consumerism,
and the media were all growing at an insane rate. As the world entered a new era of mass
communication and technology (i.e., "technoculture"), writers started tapping into the theme of
technology going into, um, overdrive and people being left powerless under its reign.
So technology is ramping up: is that enough to make people freak out? Possibly, but the
postmodernists had more factors on their side. Namely, a little thing called the Cold War. The
Cold War was basically a game of chicken, in which the ongoing suspicion between the East and
West was so thick, you could cut it with…a dystopian story.
Technology + a war of distrust = Big Brother is watching.
And remember, the idea that you're being controlled, that your life isn't your own, is
especially horrific for postmodernists, who were all about person freedom and, frankly, chaos.
The order being imposed on the world around them—be it through technology or spies—was
enough to psych them out.

FRAGMENTATION
 Let's hop in our Shmoop time machines and head back to the 18th century: a little period
we like to call the Enlightenment. Enlightenment folks were all about order, rationality, science,
reason, and unity. Yeah, not exactly a postmodern manifesto.
As with any movement worth its salt, Enlightenment thinking had its fair share of
challengers. And as time went on, new movements started to flourish and to tap into social
changes that were the order of the day. After Romanticism and Gothicism had their run,
modernism came around the corner—after World War I, the modernists were all about
uncertainty, alienation, and fragmentation.
Sound familiar?
Yeah, the modernists and postmodernists had a lot in common. But here's the thing:
modernists tended to express a sense of sadness about this turn of events (hello, The Waste
Land  ), seeing the fragmentation as something to be mourned. Some modernists even tried to
cling onto order, using art as a beacon of meaning in a world where meaning seemed to have
been totally lost.
Postmodernism, on the other hand, doesn't hanker after these qualities or try to hold onto
them. Quite the opposite: it embraces the idea of fragmentation and uses it to create playful texts
that reflect and explore the chaos of the world. No attempts to find some sort of grand meaning
or insight ("grand narratives," that is); these dudes were skeptics to their souls.
________________________________________________________________

Curaçao Cure
Short Story/Paulino Lim, Jr.
Three years and the pitch-dark has not ceased to amaze. It smells sticky and oily, and he knows,
that if he rotates his arm in the air, it will churn like rarefied turpentine. Bringing his wristwatch
to his face, he sees its luminous dials angling 4:30. He cocks his ears in the direction of
Candido's bed, two feet away, hoping to gauge how his cabin-mate is sleeping. He hates to wake
Candido up, but he inevitably does. If not with the suction noise of the tightly sealed door being
opened, it'll be the bathroom light switch or the whooshing sound of the toilet in the bowels of
the ship.
"Go right ahead," Candido growls, "I'm awake."
"Sorry, pare, I'll be quick. I'm out of here in ten minutes." He grabs his eyeglasses and work
clothes he placed on the stand the night before, and goes into the cubicle-size bathroom, before
turning on the light. He peers at the thin brown face in the mirror, and with his fingers massages
his jowl against the cheekbones.
When he comes out, he sees that Candido has turned on the cabin lights. He says, "Really sorry
to wake you up. Let me just put on my shoes."
"Take your time, Andy. I don't want you to fall in the dark."
Putting on his shoes, Andres wonders. Does he hear genuine concern in his roommate's morning
gruffness? Candido sits up, the recessed overhead light casting a sheen on his balding head,
saying, "Man, you sure were restless last night."
"Was I snoring?"
"Worse, you were making a gagging sound, like choking on something. I shook you but you
didn't wake up."
"I'm sorry."
"For a moment, I thought you were having bangungot."
Andres exclaims, "What's that?
"I thought you studied medicine."
Andres winces at the remark and says, "Animal medicine. And, please, don't remind me."
"Sorry."
Andres tells him, "Not as sorry as I am. It's okay. So, tell me, what's bangungot?
"It's a disease that strikes men in their sleep. The cases aboard the ship all involved Filipinos."
"Did they die?"
"That's what I heard. I only witnessed one case though since I`ve worked here."
"How long have you been working here?"
"Twelve years."
Andres whistles softly, thinking of his own three years. If only he'd passed the licensing exam
for veterinarians. Would that have made a difference? It doesn't help to know that immigrant
professionals in the United States take step-down jobs while waiting to pass qualifying exams.
Doctors become nurses and pharmacists, optometrists become opticians, lawyers take on clerical
jobs... the list goes on. Many stay that way because they can't pass the exams. It may sound
terrible to a Filipino, but not to an American, who may know about music graduates clerking in
record stores, and PhD's becoming "freeway flyers," the name given to part-timer instructors
who conduct a class in one city, get in their cars and drive to another school for a second or third
round of teaching.
"Yup, I was as young as you when I started," Candido says, as he slips back under the blanket,
"Now I'm a grandfather. Shut the light on your way out, will you?"
*****
ANDRES finds perks in his work, when he doesn't think about how menial the work is. His
previous assignment was to polish the brass rails on the stairways and clean the public toilets.
Now, he cleans the adult and children's pools, swabs the deck, and lays out the lounge chairs. He
watches the swimmers go into the fenced and elevated pool areas, the sunbathers lounge and oil
their pot and hard bellies. He watches out for discarded paper cups, which he picks up and takes
to the trash cans near the bar, where he exchanges pleasantries with the bartender Tony, who
keeps whistling the ditty "Oh, Visayan Islands of My Heart."
An unthinking job mainly, it becomes hard when he watches women wearing string bikinis walk
nonchalantly about, lie on the lounge chairs and turn their bodies to the sun. Then he thinks of
Sandra back home and the dimpled piquancy of her charm, the touch of her skin and wet hair on
the white sands of Boracay. This image quickly fades at the sight of buns and breasts that regress
his fantasies into suckling dreams.
He's putting cushions on the chairs near the bar, when Tony calls out to him, "Going ashore
today, Andy?"
"I've to make a call," Andres says, looking past the bar at the shoreline of St. Thomas, capital of
the Virgin Islands.
"Good luck," says Tony, who is wiping the sinks and bringing out trays stacked with cocktail
glasses. "Three other cruise ships have already docked, waiting to unload thousands of tourists.
They'll be jamming those pay phones"
"I know," Andres says, knowing that callers take advantage of the much cheaper rates on shore.
Tony says, "Don't go for the street phones. Your best bet are the pay phones in the mini-malls.
There's one on the balcony behind the Hard Rock Cafe building. It's across the street from where
the tender drops you off. How much time do you have to make the call?"
"Two hours. But it's Saturday over there and she isn't expecting the call."
"You want to surprise her."
"Exactly. It's her birthday."
"Oh, that's nice. You're the kind of guy who sends his girlfriend birthday gifts of roses and
chocolates."
"Please," Andres says, waving aside Tony's sarcasm.
"Hope you make the call. If you can't, don't feel bad. She might have other plans for the
weekend. Besides, you don't have to sing the lonely sailor's blues. There's always the sure-fire
Curaçao cure."
Andres shakes his head on his way to the storage room for more cushions.
*****
WEARING a baseball hat, Andres nods at the Filipinos in white uniforms checking out the
passengers lining up to go ashore. He slips his ID card into the machine, pulls it out at the buzz,
and steps on the bridge to the tender, a boat that carries over two hundred at a time. The tender
chugs toward the shore, its diesel tingeing the humid Caribbean air.
He skirts the taxis and hawkers at the docking area that runs parallel to the main street, fronting
stores that offer French perfumes and tanzanite jewelry without sales tax, and boutiques
showcasing trinkets and souvenirs. He bounds up a stairway to the balcony behind the Hard
Rock Cafe. A woman wearing a straw hat already has the phone and a Chinese man sits on the
top step, waiting his turn. Andres looks at his watch and holds down his breath to wait. Speaking
French, the woman in the straw hat leans leisurely against the pink wall; the Chinese on the
stairway seems wrapped up in meditation.
Andres calculates a thirty-minute wait before he gets on the phone. Sandra must be preparing to
attend Mass at nearby Santo Domingo Church, which she does every Saturday. On Sundays she
sleeps in, for on weekdays she gets up at four o'clock to be at work by eight. It hurts to think
about the time Sandra spends to commute from Quezon City to Makati; his father got her the job
as a receptionist in a fellow doctor's office. In four hours, he's already put in half a day's work,
and he's ready whenever the ship calls for overtime.
Fifteen minutes, the French woman is still on the phone, her tone cooing and laughing, sprinkled
with mon ami and mon cherie. The Chinese begins to flex his arms, as if rowing a boat, breaking
the rhythm to glance at his wristwatch. Is that how he keeps his poise, doing sit-down tai chi?
Compared to the Chinese, Andres must seem delirious, as he shifts his weight from foot to foot,
puts his arms behind and clamps a hand on the watch, as if to slow down time.
When it is his turn at the telephone, the Chinese looks at Andres and gestures "ten" with his
fingers. Andres nods and mouths, "Thank you." He sees three other people waiting and tries to
keep still, the passing minutes now paced by a Mandarin cadence.
Finally, the phone is his. He slips a card into the slot and dials. He cups his other ear and says,
"Hello, this is Andy, yes, Andy. May I please speak to Sandra."
"She's not here, Kuya Andy."
"Where is she?"
"She is in Tagaytay. . . a conference. She was invited by her boss."
"When will she be back?"
"I don't know, Kuya."
Still holding the phone as the line goes dead, he says aloud, "Happy birthday, Sandra, hope you
have a good time in Tagaytay." He wipes the phone dry against his shirt and replaces it on the
hook, and removes his fogged-up glasses. Outside, walking to the landing dock, he gazes blankly
at the panorama of clouds and white ships and a dark blue sea.
In an undertone the Filipino who stands in the sun as he checks the ID's of returning passengers,
says to Andres, "Why so early, pare?"
"Nothing much to do here."
"So hot, just like Manila."
Andres pockets his ID card and descends the stairway to the pontoon bobbing next to the boat.
As he steps into the tender, he offers his hand to the woman following him; her blonde hair is cut
short and tapered down her nape. She smiles and takes his hand lightly, acknowledging the
courtesy rather than help which she obviously doesn't need. Andres finds an empty bench in the
lower deck, the woman sits next to him, shading the smell of diesel with her scent. The tender
unmoors and swings out toward the ship. Somehow, even without his uniform and nametag,
Andres finds himself slipping into the mindset of a crewman on his watch, ready to wipe spilled
soft drink on the deck or fulfill a bather's request for a towel.
"Excuse me." Andres starts at the woman talking to him. "I heard you speak to the man at the
pier. What language was that?"
"It was Tagalog," Andres says, holding back the crewman's deferential "Ma'am," when he sees
her smile.
"Is that the same as Ilocano?"
"Not really. They're both spoken in the Philippines, but quite different."
"Hmn. I have this friend at work, Isabel. She speaks to her mother on the phone in Ilocano.
That's what she told me."
Andres wants to hear more, pleased that he needs no pretext to look at her face. He sees the
contours of her tank top, but no cleavage, the bobbed hair giving her face the clean lines of a
Grecian bust.
"I can tell when Isabel's speaking in Ilocano, even when she tries to keep her voice down."
"Oh, yeah?"
"No kidding. Her gesture's different, the way she moves her hand."
"Really," Andres says, puzzled at the idea of a language dictating its own gestures in speech.
Perhaps, it's the same as putting on the crew's mustard yellow shirt to polish the brass rails on the
stairways, or blue jacket to wait on tables.
"Nice talking to you," the woman says, as the tender nears the huge white ship. "Say 'Hi' next
time I see you around."
"I shall," Andres says, putting on his sunglasses and allowing her to walk ahead. On the pretext
of watching his steps, he looks at her legs walking up the tender stairs and crossing the bridge to
the ship.
*****
ANDRES sees the empty bar, and smiles ruefully at Tony wiping the stainless-steel sink. Keep
busy even when there's nothing to do, seems to be the axiom of contract workers aboard the ship.
Polish the brass rails, start at the bottom all the way to the fourteenth deck; do the bathrooms on
the way down, and then, do the rails again.
Tony looks up and say, "Aba? I didn't expect you here this early. What can I get you?"
"Water, please, with ice," Andres sits, and scans the lounge chairs, undisturbed by the few
sunbathers and swimmers who've not gone ashore.
"Did you make that phone call?"
"Yes, I did."
"You don't look too happy about it."
"Oh, I'm okay," Andres says, forcing a smile.
Feigning sympathy, Tony says, "I know, sometimes, a phone call home makes you lonelier than
you were before." Then he says, "Of course, you can call again in Curaçao, or. . . ."
"I know, I know, take the sure-fire Curaçao cure at the Venue Hotel."
Tony chuckles but quickly turns impassive when two men approach, the red-haired man sitting
two bar stools away from Andres. They order fruit punches and Andres begins to eavesdrop
when he hears the redhead with thick jowls, boasting, "This is my tenth cruise, since I retired
eighteen years ago."
The redhead's name is Russ, Andres gathers, the man with the salt-and-pepper hair is Sieg. "So,
you've been in this part of the Caribbean before," Sieg is saying.
"Many times. But my wife and I don't take the land tours anymore. Hate to see those shanties and
garbage on the streets in some of these ports."
"Don't blame you. I feel the same way."
"Ain't the islands pretty though, from afar, I mean? Beats shovelling the snow in front of the
garage back home."
"I'm looking forward to Curaçao. They say it's a nice place."
"You bet. Looks like a Dutch village."
"I was told Curaçao has a synagogue that's open to tourists." Sieg says. "I've never been in one
before."
To visit a synagogue, must be an interesting first. He sees Tony smiling, as if reading his
thoughts and saying, "Don't be foolish, man, go to Venue Hotel instead, and find solace in the
arms of a Columbian beauty."
*****
"Good morning," Andres greets Candido, his bald head sheeny with the cabin lights.
"Last night was a surprise," Candido says. "You were talking and laughing in your sleep."
"What was I saying?"
"I didn't catch it. But then I heard you sing. The song that Tony sings at our socials."
"You mean, 'Oh, Visayan Islands of My Heart.' That's funny, I'm not Visayan."
"You've been around him too much."
"We work on the same deck," Andres says. "How was work last night? Did that old guy at your
table give you problems?"
"Yeah. First he orders the steak and says, "It's no good. Take it back.' Then he orders the fish.
'Can't taste the damn thing,' he complains. The maitre d' has told him we can prepare a special
menu. He says he'll think about it."
"He's probably lost his sense of smell," Andres says. "I hate to think of the food that's wasted on
ship."
"Well, the ship grinds it up and feeds it to the fish. Oh, by the way, they're
serving adobo and pansit at the buffet today."
"Thanks for telling me."
"Look for the trays that say 'Menudo' and 'Singapore Rice Noodles.' They won't call it adobo or
pansit," Candido says. "On your break today, are you getting off in Curaçao?"
"I don't know yet? Have you seen the synagogue there?"
"Oh, yes, nice place of worship. It has benches but no pews, no altar images either."
"How do you get to it?"
"Cross the pontoon bridge, go down the road that connects to it. When you reach the square. . .
you'll see the trees, turn left. You won't miss it. There are signs."
By midmorning, the pool deck has not attracted many sunbathers and swimmers. Andres keeps
busy, with another half hour on his watch. He straightens cushions, pick up bits of paper napkins,
pausing to look at the Dutch village. The sun catches the red tiles of pitched roofs and the pastel
walls of green, beige and amber.
He feels a jolt, nudged by an unseen hand, when he sees the woman walking towards him. It's the
blonde with the bobbed hair he met in the tender from St. Thomas. She's still wearing the same
tank top, now with its matching bikini that shows her belly button and the sinuous fullness of her
legs.
"Good morning," he says, holds back the deferential "Ma'am."
"Hi," the woman says, as she walks on by.
He feels stung, worse than being slapped, then berates himself. What did he expect, greeting her
in his denim work clothes? He stares hard at her, forgetting his place in the ship. The blonde
stretches herself on the lounge chair, spilling her whiteness on the blue cushion. He lets out a
lungful of air that hisses against clenched teeth, and propels himself toward the bar. Tony is
bringing in trays of empty glasses. He looks at his watch and throws another glance at the
blonde. She's waving, trying to catch his attention. Warily, he approaches. She sits, swinging her
legs on the chair's edge, and squints at him.
"I thought you looked familiar," she says, laughing, "the man from the Virgin Islands. How's it
going?"
He doesn't quite know how to respond. Is she ribbing or flattering him? So he smiles and asks,
"What can I do for you?"
"Could you order me a piña colada from the bar?"
In seconds he finds the proper response. "Yes, Ma'am."
At the bar, Tony gives him a bemused look. Andres stammers, "I need, I need... oh, shit, that
woman over there needs, I mean, wants a piña colada."
"One piña colada coming up," Tony chirps.
"I'm off now, Tony. Will you take it to her?"
"What's the hurry, man? Don't you want to do it yourself? She's a real stunner." Tony asks, and
then grins when he sees Andres looking in the direction of Venue Hotel.
AND BEYOND MORE WALLS
Short Story/Bienvenido N. Santos

I went to New York to see the Statue of Liberty and my cousin Manuel who left the Philippines
sixteen years ago. At the International House there was no room for me. Summer classes had
started and the House was full. My plea, “I’m a Filipino” didn’t do me any good. Corregidor had
fallen long ago and Life magazine had a picture of General Wainwright surrendering to the Japs
at Bataan, and there was another picture of my little countrymen advancing toward the enemy
with white banners flying.
[2] So I stayed in a hotel that night. It was hot, like summer in the Philippines. The elevated
[train] roared across my pillow through my brain and all night I lay awake in the dark thinking of
home and my childhood, and of railroads beyond the whitewashed walls, trains running into the
night for near and far off places. /
[3] In the other room, at right angle to mine, a white woman was lying on the bed, reading under
the lamp light, and I wondered if she had already seen the Statue of Liberty. Neither had I, but I
had already seen my cousin Manuel. It was midsummer when I saw him and it was hot like the
first night I arrived in New York and could not sleep. When I finally located his apartment, it
was already night, but the sun was still shining over the Hudson. I was excited to see him after
these many years.
[4] He knew I was coming. “Come over the earliest you can,” had had said over the phone. I
wanted to believe there was eagerness in his voice.
[5] I knocked on the door of his room and waited. What did he look like now? What would I say
to him? Should I tell him that his mother was dead, that his only brother was in the Sanatorium
when I left the Philippines? I knocked on the door again.
[6] “Who izzit?” sounded the voice from the room. Strange that I knew it was his voice. This was
more familiar than the voice I heard over the phone.
[7] “This is Ben,” I said, putting my ear to the door, eager for another sound of his voice. Manuel
and I were like brothers and he was older than I.
[8] The door opened slowly. “Ben!” he cried, pulling me inside the room and closing the door
after me.
[9] We embraced, and I tried to cry out his name, but there was a choking in my throat. He gave
me a chair and I looked around and saw a girl sitting on the bed, playing cards. /
[10] It was a small, stuffy room, smaller than the room I occupied in the hotel. There were
curtains on what looked like windows, a wooden table and two chairs, an ice box near a little
closed door. Outside those windows was a circular grass court hemmed in by walls, and beyond,
more walls.
[11] Manuel looked exactly as I thought he would look. Tall and slim. He had on a silk blue shirt
that matched the light blue of his cuffless trousers. He wore a gold wrist watch.
[12] “You have not changed,” he said, above the sound of the radio on a small table by the bed.
He was smiling.
[13] “Turn that thing off,” he said, and the girl turned the radio low. She was radiantly white and
thin.
[14] “Oh,” said Manuel as if remembering there was another person in the room, “this is Helen.
Helen, this is Ben, my cousin.”
[15] Helen turned toward me and smiled. Her teeth were not as her lips had promised. “Jesus! it's
beastly hot tonight,” said Manuel as he walked toward the ice box, and opened it, peering inside.
“Well, well, what do you know, after sixteen years, we meet in New York.”
[16] I chuckled. Manuel has not changed, I repeated to myself. His thin lips was [sic, check]
always smiling. His eyes black and deep like my mother’s.
[17] “How do you like America?” Manuel asked, putting the beer bottles on the table.
[18] “You mean New York?” I asked. /
[19] “America—just the same.”
[20] “It’s fine.”
[21] Looking at him, I thought he was much better looking than his brother at the Sanatorium.
Manuel had such a young face, he could pass for less than his thirty-five years.
“How did you live through the winter? Was it cold out there in the Midwest?”
[22] He spoke like an America, very fluently. I was ashamed of my accent.
[23] He placed empty glasses on the table, saying how cold it could be sometimes in New York.
A voice moaned over the radio, as if the signer were singing a farewell before dying.
[24] From where we sat my back was toward the girl, but whenever I looked at the mirror over
the dresser, I could see her, shuffling the cards, laying them on the bed.
[25] “Shall we drink?” Manuel asked, and I shook my head.
[26] He laughed softly and peered again in to the ice box. “You should learn how to drink, Ben.
This is America.”
[27] Placing soft drinks on the table, he opened a bottle for me and poured into my glass.
[28] “I like beer,” he said after a while, opening the bottle.
[29] The cold drink was nice to my parched throat, and I nearly finished the whole glass. /
[30] “Darn good, that drink,” he said, pointing to my glass, “But there’s no kick to it.”
[31] “Give me a beer,” said Helen.
[32] “Help yourself,” he answered, looking at me fondly. For some time there were no words
spoken, only the singing from the radio, and the clatter of the tin bottle cap on the floor after
Helen had opened her beer. She went back to her cards. [what could she be doing in the 21st
century?]
[33] “Well,” I said, not knowing what to say.
[34] “What did you feel after Pearl Harbor?”
[35] “I wanted to stop studying.”
[36] He shook his head. “Bad times. I bet you have cried a lot since then.”
[37] I admitted it. “Haven’t you?” I asked.
[38] “After sixteen years, Ben, you can’t cry no more.”
[39] The walls were bare except for a small framed painting in water color, a reproduction of a
scene in Venice.
[40] “That’s not mine,” Manuel explained, pointing at the picture with his glass. “That was there
when I took this room. Funny, in the beginning I carried a picture of Father and Mother and my
brother Berto in my pocketbook, and had an enlargement made of them. Framed them in style,
and placed them on my dresser. I looked at them when I was feeling kind of homesick, but heck,
a man can’t keep doing that for sixteen years without going nuts.”
[41] There was a picture of Manuel on the dresser, his arm around a plump American girl in a
bathing suit. /
[42] “When was the last time you wrote home?” I asked.
[43] “Let’s see…Five years ago…More or less.”
[44] “I know,” I said. “Suddenly your folks didn’t know where you were. Why did you stop
writing them?”
[45] “Well, I guess I had nothing more to say. Surprised?”
[46] “No,” I managed to say. I did not tell him: Manuel, I was around when your mother died.
She had a hard time dying. Cancer. People said it was because of you, that she was waiting to see
you before she died. And when I left Manila, I saw Berto in the Sanatorium, looking like a
skeleton. See him for me, Berto said, and give him my love.
[47] “What’s the matter?” asked Manuel.
[48] “Nothing,” I answered, wiping my face. “It’s hot around here.”
[49] “I suppose,” he said as if he had not heard me, “I have to ask, how’s Father, Mother, how’s
Berto? And maybe you have sad news to tell. Go ahead, Ben. I can take it, don’t you think I can?
Suppose they are all dead. What of it? For all we know, it may be worse for them now living
than dead.” He paused, as if he had all of a sudden become very tired. After a while, he added.
“C’mon, try this beer, it won’t hurt you, son.”
[50] A radio voice was crooning: /
The shepherds will tend the sheep / The valley will bloom again…
[51] “Oh yes,” Manuel said, “in one of their last letters I got, they mentioned about a terrible
storm.”
[52] “That was long ago, five or six years ago. Terrible storm indeed. Swept the whole town.
There was a flood, too. Left sand on our rice fields; many houses were blown down, but your
house withstood the typhoon.”
[53] He looked sleepy, but now he brightened up. “Good ol’ house,” waving his land in tribute.
“Those big round posts, think hard wooden walls. That house will stand forever. And that’s a
fact. Do you know how old it is? About a hundred yeard old. No kiddin’. Lots of people have
lived and died there. Pretty soon, there will be nothing in that ol’ good house but ghosts, and
mine will not be one of them either...no, sir!” He shook his head.
[54] Then I saw a bellhop’s uniform hanging near the wash room. Manuel saw me looking at it,
and he laughed. “A ghost in a bellhop’s uniform, that’ s rich!”
[55] He wanted some more beer, but there was no more beer.
[56] “Darn it!” he said. The soft drink in my glass was no longer cold and there was no air in the
room, it seemed.
[57] “Yep, yep,” Manuel muttered under his breath, looking into his empty glass, “Darn good ol’
house. Stronger than the church. You know our great grandfather was richer than the church,
but…/
[58] “The church roof was blown down,” I said.
[59] “You don’t say! Well, for heaven’s sake! What did the ol’ padre and his…say, we were
servers in that church on weekends, remember?”
[60] I smiled, remembering. My cousin started laughing, very loudly this time, and the girl in the
mirror looked at him.
[61] “Did that padre ever know,” he laughed, “I always tasted the wine ahead of him? Maybe I
owe the ol’ padre my excellent taste for drinks.”
[62] The girl bent toward the radio and the song drown Manuel’s laughter—clap, clapping hands,
deep in the heart of Texas!
Involuntarily, my cousin started beating to the rhythm.
[63] There was a newspaper lying on the floor at my feet, and I stooped, trying to read the
headlines.
[64] “What is you draft classification?” Manuel asked, standing beside me.
[65] “II-A. Deferred until further notice on account of my studies. How about you?”
[66] “Me? I’m great! He bent his head with a flourish as if he were a courtier before a grand
lady, “Greetings to Manuel Buenavista, from the President of the United States…” and relaxing,
added in his natural voice, “I’ll soon be inducted, you know.”
[67] “How do you like it?”
[68] “I love it. I’m going to die for my country!” he / tried to mimic a soap box orator.
[69] “He’s crazy,” said Helen.
[70] “Shut up! I’m going to die for my country,” he said and then paused dramatically, as if he
had forgotten his lines. “Hell, what’s my country? Remember what we used to sing in school?”
[aside: ambivalence]
[71] And he sang:
[72] My country ‘tis of thee / Sweet land of Liberty. / Of thee I sing.
[73] “You’re nuts!” said Helen, “That’s America.”
[74] “What d’ye think it was, One Dozen Roses?...Boy those songs we sang in school! We don’t
hear the likes of them these days. Then our school programs…”
[75] Now it was truly oppressively warm in the room, but Manuel’s reminiscing was contagious.
I remembered Manuel was the only kid in town who played the violin. He used to say he would
be a great violinist.
[76] “You took the violin with you, didn’t you, Manuel? I asked.
[77] “Yep, I did. But what good did it do to me? Like a mouse—yes, I was like a mouse—I lived
from hole to hole, hellish dumps like this, and every time I thought I’d found a place where I
could play it, my neighbors raised hell, knocked on the wall and called me names…how d’ye
like that?”
[78] “Maybe you played lousy,” said Helen, without looking at him. She was still playing
solitaire. /
[79] “I did not! Ask Ben—what do you say, Ben?—Or suppose I did, what the hell? All that
mattered was that I wanted to play, and there was not place where I could play. Sometimes, no
time either—that’s it—time and place—work all day and half the night, or all night and half the
day. There were days I didn’t even have a room. Slept in subways and when cops saw my case,
they raised their eyebrows and said, ‘Ah, a virtuoso!’ Jesus! Those were terrible days.”
[80] The night had deepened, and through the windows I could no longer see the other walls
beyond the inner court where the grass was brown dry. In the lighted room, Manuel seemed
older.
[81] “But now, you can…” I started to say.
[82] “What’s the use?” he interrupted me. “Besides, look at my hands!”
[83] “Now, do you see?” he asked. And I recalled faintly his letters from California—working in
the fields, chopping wood, hoboing—Fresno, Sacramento, Alaska, Chicago, New York.
[84] I wanted another drink. My throat was dry again, but instead I said, “I think I’d better be
going.”
[85] Manuel said nothing. He just looked at me and followed me to the door.
[86] “Good-bye,” I said.
[87] “Come again sometime, Ben, before I start in this / business of dying for our country.” He
spoke wearily and seemed very tired indeed.
[88] He took out a cigarette case from his shirt pocket, and again I saw his hands—these had
aged, unlike his face, they had died a long [time] ago. He held out the packet to me.
[89] “Say,” he drawled in his beery breath, and looked at Helen.
[90] “No, thanks,” I answered looking at the girl playing cards on the bed. “I don’t smoke.”
[91] Back in my own room, I felt as if someone I knew had died, and in the darkness I was
missing him. I walked toward the window. Overhead, somewhere in the skies above the city,
came the drone of an airplane. The white girl in the other room, the one I saw on my first night in
New York, was on her knees by her bed. She was praying. So close. Like she was in the same
room with me. There was no image of a saint on the wall, only a picture of the Waldorf-Astoria
in color print.

ALDUB KALYESERYE
READ:
https://www.academia.edu/32868785/Attracting_an_Audience_for_Love_AlDub_and_Filipino_Millenni
als

CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS
WATCH: Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous ( 1937 film)