Danton Remoto's Nostalgia
/Book Review of Riverrun: A Novel by Danton Remoto (Penguin Books, Singapore, 2020)
I love Part 1 but I’m not exactly enthused by Part 2.
"Memory's Clear, White Light" is rich in detail and uberty. We first meet Danilo plucking his father's gray hairs so he would be allowed to go to the movies. We learn how his parents scrimp so in order to subscribe to Reader's Digest and Encyclopedia Britannica and help Danilo polish his English. There are fond memories of champurrado con daing (chocolate rice porridge and dried fish) breakfasts, munching on Chocnut, or drinking RC Cola. The kid trembles at stories about the mangkukulam (sorcerer), and finds "American milk” tasteless. He survives a private school run by petty autocrats and hears about a disturbance in the South, and gets a first-hand look at military corruption.
One of the hilarious chapters is of Danilo's spinster aunts gossiping about two teenagers who miss Sunday mass for a tryst at a "motel from across the church." They squeal like pigs, says the aunt, and compete with the Dutch priest who “intoned the Sursum Corda in an accent that nobody could understand.” In their third meeting, however, "in the fever of their lovemaking,” the girl experiences vaginismus, and the boy "could not withdraw much as he wanted to, because she was squeezing him so tightly"! Only the timely arrival of a doctor who injects something to relax the girl's vagina muscles saves the day. But everyone now knows about it.
Compare this with the second to the last chapter in Part 2, where Danilo recalls a one-night stand with someone (Angus) he meets in a Scottish bar. Remoto writes: "Then Angus looked at me, his eyes the colour of far mountains. His left hand touched the back of my head, drawing me closer to him. He closed his eyes, and then he embraced me tightly. His eyelashes were softly curved and golden. He gave me swift, soft kisses on the lips." So far, so good. But once they are in Angus' flat, it’s all goes downhill. Angus can’t get an erection ("all I touched was an earthworm, soft and small and sheathed in its skin"), and promptly goes to sleep leaving Danilo to lament that “all I heard were snores, and all I saw was a back turned to me in that cold and lonely bed." The trademark Remoto wryness is still there, but not the humor from his aunt’s gossip.
Danton Remoto
And there you are: Sex in the "old country" was fun and more colorful, sex in a village of
“The Country of Dreams” nothing but a snoring earthworm.
There are similar contradictions elsewhere. Everything about Danilo at Basa is colorful – from reading of the Sunday Times Magazine and Liwayway, to listening to daily radio melodramas together with everyone else; from flying kites to the barber Old Damaso’s summer circumcision sessions. Part 2 gets depressing with chapters on "how to survive as a nouveau poor," the listing of opportunists, hangers-on, hare-brained socialites, and repulsive artists judging which woman's body is fit for a Miss Universe sash. Danilo patiently lasts through a conference run by the Opus Dei, that self-proclaimed new vanguard of the Catholic Church, known more for its explications of why sex before marriage, masturbating, and making love just for the fun of it are sins in God's eyes.
“One of the hilarious chapters is of Danilo’s spinster aunts gossiping about two teenagers who miss Sunday mass for a tryst at a ‘motel from across the church.’”
Do not be fooled by the catchy title about his studies at the Ateneo. "Still Groovy After All These Years" contains not a single hip episode about undergraduate education at Loyola Heights. So why then does Danilo (and Remoto?) not go to UP Diliman (the poor's gateway to liberal education and a decent future) instead of opting for a scholarship at "that school behind UP's backyard," as we once fondly called our neighbor? The novel does not tell us. Instead, this chapter is so fleeting you get this feeling that Remoto just wants to get the Ateneo episode over with and shift our attention to Gatwick airport.
Even the novel’s digs at the Marcos dictatorship differ in Parts 1 and Part 2. In the former, the nastiness and tackiness of the Marcoses are on full display. Remoto reminds us how much “Madame” was both a Machiavellian and a nutcase. For here she was addressing the Foreign Correspondents' Association of the Philippines sometime in the mid-1970s: "There is a hole in the universe…From this black hole comes the energy field of the universe. This energy field, my friends, is directed at my beloved country, the Pearl of the Orient Seas. Thus, we are truly blessed because this positive force will lead us to progress, to our dream of development for our dear Philippines."
In Part 2, Imelda appears as the top judge of the Miss Universe contest. She says nothing. The meshuga has disappeared.
Riverrun is Remoto's first novel; it is not yet "the novel" that will enthrone him as one of the country's top fictionists. But he is heading there. Overall, this is still a fun read; a must-buy book. And try the family recipes that are in many of the chapters. Sumptuous.
Like Remoto, Patricio N. Abinales grew up in a frontier northwestern Mindanao town, and met similar characters and did the same shenanigans as Danilo. But instead of the squealing young couple cursed by vaginismus, his town’s gossip was about the heart of a senior city councilor giving up as he made love to a mistress three times his age in a seedy motel.
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