 |
| EXIE ABOLA |
| The Shakespeare guy |
| THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS STORY. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. |
 |
 |
 |
| He had never seen or touched anything quite like it. The green leather, finely textured but smooth to the fingertips, the red and gold trim, the foil-stamped title on the broad spine: The Norton Shakespeare. He opened the book at random; it opened to Twelfth Night, page 1774, Act I Scene 5. He looked down and across the spread, drinking in the sight of the letters and spaces between them. He smiled upon seeing the names "Viola" and "Orsino" and "Feste" as if having the good fortune of running into old friends in a new country. He turned the page and marveled at the off-white, almost yellow paper, milky to the touch, thin and delicate, worthy of a most respectful reader. No, he couldn’t remember having seen or touched a book like this, much less owning one. Now it was his.
As he kept turning the pages, going back to the table of contents, glancing at the genealogy of kings in the endpapers, dipping into the essays in the appendices, he couldn’t decide which play he liked the most. Sometimes he agreed with a good majority of critics that Hamlet was unsurpassed. Other times he thought King Lear plumbed the depths of despair like no other, and he affirmed the twentieth century’s acclamation of that work. Still other times he thought he preferred one of the comedies – As You Like It, featuring the compellingly complex Rosalind, or Much Ado About Nothing, with the sparkling verbal sparring of Benedick and Beatrice. Maybe it was even Henry V, the history that towered over the rest with its grand ambivalences. Then his mind turned to Macbeth, and thought how difficult it was to take a hero and turn him into a villain without ever making him completely hateful. His mind turned to such thoughts now, but they didn’t need much prodding or the benefit of an occasion. He was, after all, the Shakespeare expert in this high school for boys where he had been teaching for more than two decades. Only a handful of the faculty members had served longer than he, and they were institutions in their own right. In the English department, two others had served longer. Wilhelmina Silva, whose hair had turned from jet black to gun metal to a shimmering white in her nearly thirty years in this school. Carlos Dureza was also nearing the end of his third decade. Benito Sales, BD’s namesake, and going on twenty-five years, had died the past school year two months before hitting his silver anniversary as a teacher. The death made Benito Deluria Maiquez (or BD to his colleagues) the third-longest-serving teacher in English. There was some to-do three years ago, when his second decade ended and his third one began, and he feigned bemusement at the program the administration had put together to honor him and two other colleagues (one in Math, another in Science) as well as all the congratulations. In truth, he felt they did not go far enough. The program was not well attended; invitations to the Friday night affair were given out late, and guests of the honorees were sparse. Some of the teachers begged off, as the date had been decided less than two weeks before the event. And anyway, why would the younger folk take a Friday night off from their vibrant lives to honor three old teachers? It was on that night, after the party and the ill-prepared songs and dances and skits were thankfully over, that it came home to BD that he was old. Marianne Veles of Math was older by three years, Enrique Realuyo of Science by five, but as he sat on the makeshift stage of the gym (erected for such special occasions) with the two older ones beside him, he felt for the first time that the difference in years between them didn’t matter to anyone. In the eyes of the other teachers and of the staff, he was just another of the old folk, relics from times gone by, useful more for what they represent than for who they are. He had heard the whispers, behind the polite smiles and attentive faces of the staff when they took his exams for mimeographing or gave out his payslip at the cashier’s or served him his coffee at the canteen (everyone made sure that his regular seat in the darkest corner of the faculty room in the canteen, farthest away from the TV tuned in to a noontime show, was available at twelve-thirty when he took his lunch), the words in hushed tones exchanged when his eyes were averted. His colleagues in the English department tolerated him, though he was held in greater affection before. After his first few years, he was routinely asked to give a short seminar on the teaching of Shakespeare and the classics during the summer months, and he thought these were the best months of the year. He would photocopy articles from commentators – AC Bradley or Frank Kermode – and hand these out. He would play tape recordings of audio performances of the plays, tapes he would make from records he still had at home. (He was particularly proud of his Richard III featuring no less than Laurence Olivier.) He would screen excerpts from movie adaptations – Olivier’s Hamlet and Henry V, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Orson Welles’s Othello and Macbeth. He didn’t mind at all that none of the participants in these seminars matched him in eagerness, or that fewer among the teachers attended them year after year. But he no longer gave the seminars. The department no longer asked him to, and though he dropped broad hints to anyone who cared to listen that he was willing to continue, no invitations came. Over the past decade, more and more of the teachers were dropping the tragedies from their reading lists, exchanging Hamlet or Macbeth for lighter fare such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When a few dropped Shakespeare altogether and replaced him with Greek plays – Oedipus or Antigone or Medea – he didn’t mind much. But when these were in turn supplanted by Arthur Miller or JD Salinger, he went up to the chairman. It was fine to supplement the works of the world’s greatest writer with modern fare, but to supplant them entirely? The syllabus requires that we teach only one Shakespeare play every year, and will we give up even that? Chita Esperanza reasoned that since the turnover of teachers was high – up to one-fourth of the English teachers every year were new – their ability to teach the Bard’s works was questionable at best, and so they seemed better off giving their students material they themselves could handle. She had given the teachers the green light to make the change, a "small deviation" from the syllabus, herself. BD was left to mutter as he left her office about watering down the curriculum. Over the last five years he became aware that only a handful of teachers still taught Shakespeare, but those who did used the same plays over and over – Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar or Midsummer – and had no need of BD’s help. Once in a while he would drop by their cubicles, lean an arm or elbow on the divider’s edge, and ask how their Shakespeare classes were going, how the students were enjoying it, if it might help for him to give a lecture or two, provide an audio recording, recommend a film version, or make copies of insightful articles. They always declined with severe politeness. The administration didn’t seem to mind either. Parents didn’t complain that their sons weren’t reading Shakespeare, and neither did the students. The only complaints BD heard of were about Math teachers who gave too much homework, a PE teacher who made inappropriate physical contact with an undressed student in the lockers, an art teacher selling cartolina and markers to students then pocketing the money. Recently a clamor arose from both teachers and students for more computers, and the principal had himself kicked off a fund drive, meeting well-off parents and possible corporate sponsors, to raise money for new computer labs as well as another audio-visual room. No one raised their voices to ask for more of the Bard. And so BD would find himself spending more and more time, swathes of mornings and afternoons even, in his cubicle, along with his students’ papers and their stunningly bad grammar, his books, and his thoughts. He would pick up his paperbacks of Dickens or Austen or Hemingway, follow the stories unfolding in their novels with some interest (he found Austen particularly charming), yet he thought their books stirred in him a thirst they themselves could not quench. Eventually, after giving A Farewell to Arms or Emma or Bleak House a fair chance to make its case – he would give each one a week, time enough to finish the novel, though he certainly didn’t finish everything he read – he found himself returning the books to his shelves and picking up his well-worn paperbacks of Hamlet or Macbeth or Much Ado. Only these could truly satisfy. He had actually taught some of these works, such as Pride and Prejudice (Wilhelmina Silva’s favorite), as a change of pace. But he couldn’t resist making the honest observation, one day in class, that Lizzy Bennet and Darcy were pale shadows of Beatrice and Benedick, and he heard the class groan. Relating the incident to a colleague, the co-teacher only said, "You’re making teenage boys read Pride and Prejudice?" with an eyebrow raised before walking away. Sometimes, and lately it happened more frequently, he would wonder if he should have come here after all, more than twenty years ago, in the full bloom of his youth, a young man barely thirty. It seemed a victory at the time, getting onto the faculty of this private school he could never have joined as a student. A product of the public school system, he went to high school in Manila and college in Diliman, and there he had the great fortune of having William Querijero Ramirez as his literature teacher in freshman year. He vividly remembered the books he would bring to class, many of them hardcover, his initials "WQR" in thick black ink on the edges of the paper. He imagined having his own library one day, shelf upon shelf with books that had the letters "BDM" on them. He sat in front, on the far left, enthralled by the old man’s readings of poetry, to his fascinating insights into this or that play, to his trenchant commentary on the world and its many ills. The highlight of the course was Hamlet. "O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew," he whispered, rolling the delectable syllables on his tongue, the words from the soliloquy he performed, perhaps too timidly, in the last week of that semester, uttering the lines on the raised platform in an empty classroom as the teacher sat in the back, his hand to his chin, a finger on his lips, his face a mask of sternness. Then BD’s eye would catch the cheap, dark varnish of the wooden panels of his cubicle, the many small scraps of paper pinned to the corkboard, the harsh fluorescent light bouncing off the glossy-white wall above the divider, and he would remember where he was and wonder why no one enjoyed the taste of these words as he did. He was here. He had made his choice. And more than two decades had gone by. * * * "Mr. Maiquez?" asked a woman’s voice. BD turned from the book on his desk. A young woman’s face peered rather forwardly at him from above the cubicle divider. "Yes?" "I was told that you’re the Shakespeare guy around here." BD chortled softly. "I guess so." "I’ll need your advice then. May I come in?" BD was startled. He looked around the cramped square of workspace and wondered where in heaven’s name he would ask her to sit. Then he spotted his briefcase on the small table, a side table of light wood bought from a furniture store going out of business that he had put here long ago to prop his things on. He took the worn, black briefcase and put it on the floor. When he looked up she was already in the narrow entrance to the cubicle: strappy sandals, blue jeans, a bright yellow t-shirt, and an equally bright face with close-cropped hair. He gestured to the table apologetically. She stepped into the tight space and sat on the table with a refreshing lack of politeness. "It’s Jocson. He’s giving me a hard time." "You’re Ms. – ?" "Nuguid. Bea Nuguid." "Hello, Bea." "Anyway, Jocson says I can only teach one Shakespeare play the whole year. Also, the syllabus for sophomores says only two major works for the year, in the third and fourth quarters. And Romeo and Juliet is the only one if you want to teach Shakespeare." She seemed unconcerned that, though they were strangers, their faces were never more than two feet apart. "Yes, it’s been like that for a while, but what some people do is – " "It’s annoying! I want to teach two plays, and I don’t want to use Romeo and Juliet. I don’t think it’s right for second-year high school students." BD raised an eyebrow. "Too much sex. It’s amazing how much sex, sexual language, sexual imagery, there is in that play." "There is," he said quietly and quickly. Of course, one could simply downplay Mercutio’s verbal naughtiness, or even ignore it entirely. Even Jocson, the department chairman, had admitted to him that he did just that. "Yet we offer it to, what, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds? Are they ready for this?" Before BD could reply, she continued. "But if you leave the sex out, what do you have left? You need it as a sharp contrast to the love of Romeo and Juliet. The love poetry becomes sappy if you don’t contrast it with the crassness of the people around them." "Excellent point." One probably lost on my colleagues. "Well," she said, and paused. "If I have to teach it . . . I’ll show the movie with Claire Danes and Leonardo diCaprio." "Why not the Zeffirelli?" "Oh, I don’t like it. Boys in tights running around the dusty streets. Olivia Hussey’s heaving bosom in the balcony scene. It doesn’t work for me." "But in the newer version, the actors mangle the language. You don’t understand every other word they say. Especially the one who plays Benvolio . . ." "But it gets the love story right. That’s the most important thing! When Romeo and Juliet spot each other across the aquarium with the bright-colored fish, oh wow." She put her hands together, stretched her arms downward, then closed her eyes. "It’s beautiful. Then the party scene, then the balcony scene, transferred to a swimming pool. Brilliant. The two of them kissing in the water. So dreamy." She had on a distant look, as if imagining the love of her life in her arms. "The movie gets the love story right, and without that, the story falls apart." "Bea?" a voice called from outside the door several cubicles away. "We’re starting." "Oh, I have to go," she said, then leaned forward, her voice dropping. "The orientation for new teachers is about to start. Can we talk about this later? What’s a good comedy I can pair with Romeo? Merchant? Much Ado? Oh, I have the Kenneth Branagh movie. Fantastic! I don’t care, I’ll get Jocson to let me teach two plays." "Well," BD began, fumbling for an answer. "A comedy. Some folks here . . . some go with Midsummer. There’s that recent movie. Though I wonder, well, if . . ." "Wait, it’s May. Why are you here during the summer?" "Here? Oh, I’d rather stay here than in my apartment. It gets really hot, and many of my books are here. It’s quiet, no one disturbs me, . . ." "Let’s talk later," she said, putting her hand on his forearm, then stood up, said a school-girlish "Bye," and stepped quickly out of the cubicle. He stood and watched her disappear through the doorway of the faculty workroom. He stayed standing there for a few moments. Her face lingered in his thoughts, and the incongruity of her words and the youthfulness of her countenance. He began to wonder how long it had been since he had heard anyone talk that way about the writer he loved most. O for a muse of fire! * * * BD trudged into the dark house. It was an old, one-floor house in the Scout area of Quezon City. It used to be a fifteen-minute commute to the school. Now it took half an hour on a good day. Every few minutes he would hear the rumble of the MRT on its elevated track in the distance. He entered the living room, but it had been a long time since it was used that way. Now it was a storage area of sorts, for the stacks of newspapers and boxes of old clothes, bottles, broken appliances, and other things that the Arceos, the owners, would collect and sell to junk shops. Old man Arceo stepped out of his bedroom door on the left of the main hallway. "Hello, Mister Shekspir!" BD nodded wearily. Arceo muttered his apologies for the state of the mess, declaring his intention to clean up one of these days, apologies he had been making for how many years BD had lost count of. He made his way past the piles of junk, past the doorway to the kitchen, to his room in the back. He turned on the light. Stacks of books rose from the floor to his waist. He opened the window, heard the radio and the shrill chatter of the househelp in the next house, and shut it as tightly as he could. In a corner stood a metal cart with his TV, VCR, and stereo. All were old and hardly used anymore. At the end, near the foot of his single bed was a study desk, half of whose surface was occupied by a phonograph, its cover thick with dust, the other half obscured by piles of tests and student themes. He was always losing the battle against paper, and no matter how many years he had been teaching he never managed to figure out how to check papers quickly and efficiently and get them back to his students right away. He shrugged, but everyone has this problem. Besides, at least there are things I’m good at as a teacher. He pictured himself in the classroom, reciting a speech from a play, any play, taking care to pronounce the words right, speaking them deliberately, meaningfully, thinking the splendor of the words and the sonorousness of his voice would combine to stoke a fire in the hearts of his students. Yes, I am good at some things, he thought, then put his bag on the chair by the table and began to undress. The closet by the inner wall was small, he had thought when he moved into this place more than ten years ago, but he found that he didn’t have need of many of his clothes after all, and little by little they had found their way into the junk heaps in the living room. Now there was just what he needed. He hardly bought anything, and for new shirts or pants he simply walked over to the tailor two blocks away. It was cheaper than going to a department store, and he never understood the thrill of bargain-hunting in Baclaran or Divisoria. He put his white polo barong on the bed, hung his gray slacks against the closet, grabbed a pair of shorts, and walked over to the bathroom. * * * BD went back to the title page of the book bound in green leather, glistening in its newness, and again read the inscription in a woman’s hand: "To our Shakespeare guy! Happy birthday! Love, Bea." He thought again how he would have preferred her writing "my" instead of "our," but all things considered, the school year, though barely three months old (it was only August), was going far better than most he could remember. "Wow, the two of you talk about Shakespeare the way other people talk about basketball," George Jocson said, as he slowed to a stop over BD’s cubicle divider. "Excuse me?" BD said, lifting his face from examining the volume. "You and Bea. I overheard you in the lounge. You’re funny together." George had a gleam in his eye, or so BD thought. "I guess that’s how it would appear to you." "Oh, don’t be offended. It’s good to see you this lively again. I’m glad to see you helping her in adjusting. The first year of teaching can be difficult, as you know. But her first three months she’s looked fine. Great even." "Good to hear." "Bea’s so refreshing. How often to do you get a girl that age – what, twenty-eight, nine? – so interested in teaching lit, eh?" "I suppose it’s unusual." "Yes, it is. And with her background. She doesn’t need this job. The father’s a sugar baron, did you know?" BD shook his head with disinterest. "She could be at home sitting pretty, no problem. Married, taking care of kids while the husband works. But no, she wants to be here. I kid her sometimes and say, ‘If you stay here, you’ll never find a boyfriend.’ She just laughs. She has a wonderful laugh." Yes, she does. "She says she’ll start on her masters soon. At UP probably. Asked me for suggestions for her thesis. You might have ideas." "If I have any, I’ll let her know." * * * "You know, if you’re going to specialize in Shakespeare, prepare for a lonely life," BD said, glancing up from his cup of coffee. Bea laughed, sinking her fork again into a slice of cheesecake. "You sound like my cousin Marie. She got her PhD in London. Expert in medieval literature. She knows Old English. Now she can’t teach in any university because no one needs an expert in that field. So after teaching here for a while, she went abroad." She glanced at the other side of this room in the canteen reserved for teachers. "Married a French guy." "Old English. That will be our fate, I think." "You, did anyone warn you to prepare for a lonely life?" I wish they had. "Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend." "It’s all right. But be ready because people will have a hard time understanding why you do it, why you bother to read this stuff, why you think it matters." "Oh, I’m a lit major, BD. I’ve gotten that all my life. Friends, family. Everyone. ‘But what kind of job will you get, Bea?’ As if getting paid is all that matters. My father banished me here when he found out I had chosen literature as my course against his wishes. Best thing that ever happened to me." "It matters a lot if you haven’t had much to begin with." "I suppose you think I have no idea what that’s like?" "I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that you’re insensitive. But . . . look at you. You could go anywhere, work anywhere. Why teach? Why teach lit? Here?" She paused to consider, then raised her glass of iced tea to her lips. "Because I choose to!" "You’ve been here half a year and so far you’re doing well. But it gets tedious pretty fast. Oh, wait." He took out a photo from his planner. "This is Greg Oledan. He was here just the other day. Were you able to meet him?" "No." "Anyway, we had a small merienda for him. He used to teach math. Five years, I think." She looked at the photo. A dark, round-faced man in shorts and a sleeveless top stood knee-deep in the waters of a beach. He was grinning into the sun, a hand over his eyes. "Where is he now?" "Palawan. He went there on a lark. He left here a while back – six, seven years ago – then worked at a bank. Then an aunt offered him a teaching job in a high school there, she was principal, and he went." "Just like that?" "Yes. Says he has no regrets." "Wow. So what’s it like there?" "Worse than here, if you can imagine. Their English is really bad. I asked, how bad? He said, think of your worst students here. Over there they’re the best." "Oh no. I don’t think I could teach there." "Me too. But he looked . . . happy. And tanned. He said come over any time." "No way I could do that. I wouldn’t survive. I’m too much of a Manila girl now." "I know. Me too. If their English is worse, teaching lit must be a nightmare. . . . I’m quite happy where I am, thank you." "You are? Are you, teaching lit? When nobody shares your love of your favorite writer? Not even your colleagues?" He pondered the question. He remembered the agony of writing academic papers for his classes in graduate school, something he never quite figured out how to do, and the shame of pulling out of the masters program after only a year and a half. The years in his room reading dog-eared copies of Shakespeare in the night after a day clerking at the post office or cranking out press releases for a softdrink company, determined to learn on his own. The time he applied as a teacher here, gave demo classes, then got the job. "Yes, I am. And I’m starting on Lear next week. Nothing like a little tragedy right before Christmas, as an antidote to their excessive cheer." "And why here, in this high school for bored rich boys?" He remembered his parents beaming at the news of his acceptance, teaching in a school where they had only dreamed of sending him to study. His mother phoning his relatives, his uncle the judge being the first. "Because I like it here." She didn’t know what to make of his answer, if he was sincere. * * * When he was new he would look into the faces of his students and see only potential. They were new, they were coming into the world of words for the first time, and he was just the right person to guide them through. As the years went on he found them more and more tiresome. There was the occasional bright or eager student, and once in a while someone would demonstrate a talent for stringing lucid sentences together – really, how hard is it for teenagers to write a coherent paragraph? – but by and large the young adolescent faces became more and more impenetrable. What did they think of the poems they read? The stories and novels? The essays they had to write, which BD had to make them write? (Teaching composition was the most tedious part of the job.) And what did they really think of Shakespeare? Did they hear his words? Did they feel the pain and joy of his characters? Were they awed by the poetry? Or did it all go by in a blur of pentametric iambs? When his student evaluations became more and more negative, he resisted at first. He justified his methods to the chairman, his colleagues, the administrators who would drop by his cubicle and ask innocently how his classes were going. But he finally wore down, and thought it best to take the path of least resistance. He followed the prescribed syllabus faithfully, never going beyond the material necessary, teaching the same works over and over, and kept most of Shakespeare (beyond the one-a-year) to himself like a precious hoard. So he would spend much of his free time in his cubicle, between the pages of a play. Lately he found himself gravitating toward As You Like It, imagining himself in the forest of Ardenne, pining after his lovely Rosalind. Sometimes she would appear as the slim, pale girl he had wooed in his college years, the two of them finding refuge in the other’s shyness, the one who disappeared with her family when they migrated to the US. Or the lanky one with penetrating eyes who scolded him for not caring when martial law raged, for preferring instead to study the barren poetry of a dead white man. The one who simply disappeared when the row of apartments she and her comrades lived in was raided. She may be dead for all he knew, but he preferred to think of her as living in the mountains somewhere, part of a ragtag crew of stubborn idealists who fought the good fight he wasn’t brave enough to join. In his mind’s eye he saw thick, lush jungles, he her naive but ardent Orlando to her Rosalind, strong and beautiful and boy-crazy. They would be drinking beer and eating cheap burgers, as they used to in one of their haunts, in front of a fire and arguing again over what constituted a meaningful engagement with life. And lately he found that Rosalind looked more and more like a girl in a bright yellow top with deep eyes, close-cropped hair, and a vivid laugh. He didn’t mind wandering about the woods for hours in her enchanting company. * * * Sometimes, as he sat in his cubicle with nothing urgent to do, the image of the old man would form in his mind. The man in the back, partly in the shadow of a late March afternoon of a school year coming to a close, his back straight, his hand taking the pen from his shirt pocket and scribbling on his index card. "Mr. Maiquez," the gravelly voice said, "that was good. B-plus. A good speech. I commend your diction especially. But I miss . . . the pain." The old man’s eyes closed, his right hand in a fist that he touched to his chest. His brows knitted. "What is he feeling at this point? The world has lost all value to him. ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.’ All because his mother has hastily remarried. You did not quite convey this sense of disillusionment and resentment." BD could still see Ramirez clearly at the back of that room, dispensing judgment, handing A’s to classmates who had done far worse in the quizzes and tests, who had shown at best a grudging interest in the class but who, when it came time for the speeches, seemed to summon a little more passion than he could. BD had replayed his speech in his head many times over since then, wondering how he should have said this word or that phrase. He considered different inflections of key words, saying a phrase slower or faster, glossing over an image or lingering over it. And he would recite the entire corrected speech to himself, thinking himself again in that room, the distant, demanding figure again in the back, and he would get it right this time in this second chance always available to him in his mind. * * * "There have been complaints, BD," George Jocson said. Next to him sat Father Jose Mendoza, the principal, and Thelma de la Cerna, the assistant principal for academics, in Father Joe’s airconditioned office. "What kind of complaints?" "Letty Baisas," Father Joe said, "you know, head of the parents association – told me recently that other parents have been telling her about certain teachers they’re not happy with." "Me?" "Not just you, BD." "On their own these complaints wouldn’t carry much weight," De la Cerna said, "but, well, the results of the year-end evaluations just came in and . . ." "Perhaps we shouldn’t pay too much attention to what students say about their teachers." "From both your students and your supervisors. BD, the fact is, all the department chairmen of English from way back never gave you sparkling reviews. Chita. Benito Sales. Old man Tenorio. What’s more, the trend has been downward these past few years. You seem to be getting worse." "I guess I’m not that good anymore. I’m not on top of my game." "And even when you were, you weren’t . . . So, it’s been on our minds for a while now." "What has?" "BD, have you thought about what you would do after you retire?" "Not really." "Does it seem like it’s a long way off?" "I guess." "Well . . . maybe it would be good for you to start giving it some thought. Before you know it, it will be time. Best to be ready." "I’ll cross the bridge when I get there." "Remember that you’d get full benefits. Plus one month’s salary for every year of service – the standard retirement package. Not bad at all. If you complete your twenty-five years, I’m sure the school will throw in something extra." "Plus no more badly written student papers. Annoying bosses. No one to keep you from your books." "What if I don’t want to?" "Please, BD. Don’t make this harder than it has to be." "You’d do a Helen Montaño on me, wouldn’t you? What would my namesake have said about this?" "Who?" "Benito Sales. He wouldn’t have put up with this." "You don’t know that, BD." "I think I do. He was the only one who took me seriously in the end." You died too soon, Benito. "We’re sorry, BD." "Besides, you’re not the only Shakespeare expert anymore." * * * "What are you doing out here? You a smoker now?" Bea stepped through the door onto the open landing of red tile just outside the faculty workroom where people stepped out to take a smoke. BD was alone, sitting on the wooden bench. She walked to the edge of the landing opposite him and lit the stick in her fingers. "I still have three sets of final exams to check. Where are you off to this summer?" "They asked me to retire," he said. "What? Who?" "Father Joe himself. Thelma. George. We had a short meeting today. Not right away. In two years, when I complete my twenty-fifth." "Can they make you do that?" "No. Well, actually, they can." He looked up at her, squinting into the late afternoon sun descending among the low condominiums across the street. "Parents are complaining about me, not just students. They’ve gone straight to the principal. You know this school and how it kowtows to its ‘clients.’ My evaluations from both students and chairmen past and present aren’t good." "But you’ve been here so long, how . . ." "They could always make a case for incompetence. If I refused to go quietly, it could come to that. It’s happened before, you know. There was a history teacher, Helen Montaño, who was eased out like that. She had been here something like sixteen, seventeen years. I hear she was awful. Rarely had a lesson plan, and spent most classes just talking about her trips abroad and all the important people she met. I hear students laughed at her behind her back. Anyway, she was eased out for being incompetent. She got a lawyer and put up a fight, but nothing happened." "Oh God, BD. I’m sorry," she said, sitting beside him. "By the way, it’s Ben." "What?" "When I came in there was already a Benito, Sales. The one who died last year? So they told me I would be called ‘BD.’ But my name is Ben." She looked confused. After a while, he continued. "Besides, how many Shakespeare experts does the school need anyway? One is more than enough. And you probably cost one-third my salary, maybe less." She turned to him and stiffened. A look of pity and anger came to her face. He looked past her. "Well, if you wanted my job, it’s yours." "What the hell are you saying?" "Jocson was all praises for you. Your kids love you. Your use of ‘educational materials and supplementary activities enhances the learning experience.’ You are ‘enthusiastic.’ You are ‘nurturing’ and ‘inspire confidence.’ He said so. And you’re going to get an MA, which I don’t have and never will." "BD, I’m sorry," she said as she stood and walked to the ledge. "I had no idea they were even thinking of asking you to leave. Oh no, it’s my fault." "Why?" "I only asked George . . . to talk to you . . . about the way you teach." "What about the way I teach?" "I also suggested that the summer workshops on teaching lit be revived." "Oh, is that so?" "George didn’t tell you?" "No, I guess he forgot." "Well, a few of the other teachers asked me if I could, you know, help out in designing some modules for certain works. So I told George I’d do it." "And you would teach them?" "Well, yes." "Right. Me, I can teach only one author. But you, you’re the only one who’s good enough. And you’d play your CDs of So-and-so reading Austen or Dickens or Eliot, and you’d have your handouts with activities, with little grids to fill up and guide questions for the rich and illiterate." "At least I can teach! You know, in the short time I’ve been here I’ve found out that I’m a good teacher. Yes, I am! I can do this. But you, how long have you been teaching? And after all this time . . . You can’t even do one author right! Do you think reciting lines from Shakespeare is the best way to make students like him? Do your little elocution contests work? Your memorization tests? Do you even think it impresses us? Maybe fifty years ago it worked, when schools still shoved your heads into Latin phrasebooks and made you recite Horace or, or Pindar." "The words must be spoken well! Great words must be spoken well! How are they going to learn to love Shakespeare if you do not recite the words as if they mattered?" "It doesn’t make sense to them, BD. His English is a foreign language to them. They don’t have ears for it, not these kids. And why don’t you care about anyone else but this one writer? There are many other good writers. . ." "I only want to read the best." "And I’ve seen your long tests. All you do is supply a passage and ask, who said this, what act, what scene. Oh God! That’s just the wrong way to do it!" He raised his hand and said very softly but clearly, "And what is the right way, ma’am?" When she didn’t answer, he continued, in the same pained and mocking voice, "Please tell me, teacher. I want to know." She took a step toward him and seemed about to utter an expletive, but it stuck in her throat, and all she could do was clench her teeth and grimace. She threw what remained of her cigarette to her feet, ground it with her right foot into the cement tile, then walked briskly back into the workroom, wisps of smoke dissipating about her. Ten minutes later she returned, wanting to apologize, but he was gone. He wasn’t in his cubicle, and neither was his worn briefcase. * * * "O for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention," BD muttered to himself. How he wished to ascend to that heaven now. The fire of the candle didn’t dance in the darkness; it just burned steadily. No air came in or out his room, the fan was off. The power was out tonight. Arceo told him, when he made his way through the mounds in the living room, that some repair work was being done that night in their street and the lights would be out from ten until six in the morning. When the lights went out on time, BD lit a lone candle in his room and didn’t feel the urge to do anything but sit up in bed and look at the steady flame in the heat of this March night. It was too dark to read, and he didn’t feel like reading. When he got here Arceo had met him at the front door and told him, sorry to say this, you’ve been a good tenant for so long, but my nephew from Samar will be going to college in Manila soon and will need a place to stay. So would you be kind enough to move out before the start of the next school year please? I hope you understand. He said he understood, and the shirtless man smiled, relieved. The candle stood on a plastic coaster perched atop a small stack of books on his desk. It stood there precariously, mere inches away from other books, sheets of paper on the desk, the stacks of books lining the walls of this cramped room, the photographs pinned to the wall. The shapes in them were too dim to see now, but he knew each one, these images of people long dead or far away. A few inches from the candle was his Norton Shakespeare, its cloth gray in the darkness, a tome full of many words, magnificent words; how could they mean so much to him and so little to others? Later, how much later in the evening he couldn’t tell, he thought he could see an old man’s stern face in the light, a face that would do nothing but remain in the shadows at the back of a classroom from a year now distant, a face that was demanding, so demanding it would not confer approval. He had hoped all these years for it, thinking that there was still hope that it would nod or a faint smile issue from its taut lips. Tonight he saw in the light of this long, slender candle that such approval would never be forthcoming. In the light he thought he saw a half-hearted ceremony, plaque and speeches and food and cheap wine, honoring him and his twenty-five years of teaching, the faces around him happy that they would finally be rid of him and his obstinate ways. He saw his uncle, big and garrulous and, in his mind, always half-drunk at family get-togethers, clapping him on the back with his broad dark hand, and saying with a voice emanating from the pit of his rotundity, "Remember, Ben, you don’t have time to read all the good books in the world." The dramatic pause, the one he no doubt used in the courtroom and in his law school classroom to great effect. "You have time only for the best." Then the self-righteous smile, broad and toothy and shiny with scotch, the hand with index finger pointing to no one in particular, in case he hadn’t made himself clear. He saw his parents the night they threw a big dinner for their only son, to celebrate his having made it in the world. And then the night he came home to find the house in flames, a fire that started in a neighbor’s house and which took most of the block with it. In the light he thought he saw Bea twenty years later, lines on a face that had lost much of its vividness, huddled in her cubicle, her books her sole protection against the emptying years. He thought how, two decades from now, she would still remember the way he lashed out at her, the only one he could reach out to, this afternoon. And what a foolish, fond old man he was. He hoped that, at least then, she would know how sorry he was. If those books catch fire, he thought. It wouldn’t take long for the room to go up in flames. The whole house, even. The stacks of newspapers in the living room began just outside his door, even leaned into the doorway when he opened it. It would be quick. The room, the curtains, the furniture, the boxes of clothes, the house. His papers, books, photos. Himself. A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage then is heard no more. If those books catch fire. Especially the one in green leather resplendent with words that were never his. He sat and looked at the flame for what seemed to him a long time. Then when the candle was nearly spent, he stood up and walked toward it. * * * She opened the letter and began to read: Dear Bea, Surprise, surprise! I hope this gets to you before the ceremony or whatever it is they’re going to do there for you to celebrate your twentieth year. (It will probably be a letdown, so don’t get too excited.) I’m doing fine over here in Palawan. I’m sure you heard that I came here exactly twenty years ago, give or take a month or two. Yes, I decided to take Greg Oledan up on his offer to teach here. I was crazy to do it, I know. I didn’t even know his phone number. I just packed, went to the airport, and took a plane. Amazing, looking back, how easy it is to make these decisions. It helped that I had some money. I had almost two million in the bank at that point (surprising what you end up with when you save a little every payday; the retirement pay didn’t hurt either). After living with Greg and his aunt for a while I got my own house. It’s not too big, but it’s just the right size and it’s near the school. Plus the beaches are twenty minutes away on foot. I’ve discovered that I love beaches. And walking. What was hard was the teaching. I never was a great teacher, as you yourself pointed out to me once. When I started here I felt like a complete fool. Greg was right. The kids here are nowhere near their Manila counterparts. The best ones here wouldn’t even get into the top five schools there. And what a world apart in career opportunities! My kids dream of being able to go abroad to work in ships or hospitals or elementary schools. If they’re lucky, they get to do it. How would that sound to our Manila boys with their dreams of wealth and comfort? It’s been hard, yes, but you know, I’m glad I came here. They look up to me here so much. I teach the teachers, not just the students. In the classroom the kids sit and look at me and listen as if I have something important to say. How I missed that. And they study so hard! So I don’t care much how bad they are when they come here. And it doesn’t bother me so much anymore that many of these boys and girls will end up fixing someone else’s bed in Florida or scrubbing floors in the bowels of a ship in the middle of the Pacific. They do this as if their lives depended on it. And I guess it does. And mine does too, I suppose. Funny. So, to answer a question you’re probably dying to ask, no, I don’t get to teach Shakespeare much. Hardly. Some of my colleagues insist on Julius Caesar just so we can have some color in our yearly elocution contests. I’ve seen some pretty good fourteen-year-old Marc Antonys here. But do I miss it? Not really. Once in a while I still read that beautiful book you gave me. And I had to send for all the books I left behind. There are no bookstores here! Just awful. No wonder their English is so bad. So I’ve become a good friend of the xerox ladies. But no, I don’t wonder anymore if I have time to read both Shakespeare and Austen (your love). I don’t have time for either. And I am happy to know that now. Well, that’s all. I may have another update after another decade or two. (If you want more details, you’ll have to visit! The address is on the envelope. I have an extra room.) Regards to everyone there who remembers me. And to George and the kids (three, right?). And so I take my leave. Adieu. Always, Benito, your Shakespeare guy Bea put the letter down. The handwriting was supple, elegant, the kind one rarely saw these days. Bea herself could hardly write a page by hand before tiring, and her letters were getting cribbed and small. When she was new here two decades ago she could write pages of lesson plan in longhand. She took out the photo in the envelope. It was of a man in shorts and a sleeveless top, knee-deep in the waters of a beach, squinting into the sun, a smile on his familiar face. He was older now, but his slim figure, which she had always seen in office clothes, seemed smaller, leaner. His face had the shimmer of a young man’s, it was even boyish, despite the wrinkles and the tufts of gray hair. She leaned back in her chair and looked at the shelf above her desk. A copy of The Brown Bard: Appropriations of Shakespeare in Philippine Drama by Beatrice Nuguid drew her eye, the book she had published after getting her masters degree. She had put her doctorate on hold, her responsibilities as a teacher increasing. She embraced her new roles, mentor to new faculty, resource for literary texts and how to teach them, class adviser, moderator of the drama club, and lately, department chairperson, and it seemed the doctorate she had put on hold might never be hers. She thought about that one year they were such friends, and she felt a smile forming on her lips and a dampness in her eyes. Oh, BD. What if he had been there when she returned that afternoon? What if she had not snapped at him? What if she hadn’t been so young and foolish and headstrong, wanting things she didn’t understand? There was a knock at the door. "Shall we go?" came the familiar voice. "Just a minute, love," she said, hoping she didn’t sound out of sorts. She put the letter and photo back in the envelope, left it in a drawer, packed her bag, and walked to the door. When she opened it, George stood there, briefcase in hand. She noticed that his arms were growing thin, his plain white button-down shirt seemed rumpled, his temples graying and sinking. For the first time in her life, he looked old. She wondered, do I look old to him, too? She glimpsed the sign on the door: Beatrice Nuguid Jocson, Chairperson, English. She remembered the first time she saw that sign. When it was posted on the door two years ago she felt that she had gotten what she had wanted for so long, and exulted. How short that joy lasts. Their eyes meet, he takes her hand, and silently they walk down the dim corridor to the exit. This story won First Prize for the Short Story in the 2005 Palanca Awards |
| THIS IS PART OF THE LITERATURA READING SERIES | CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO LITERATURA |