The Bread of Salt and Other Stories

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Vincente F. Gotera

The protagonists in Gonzalez's stories are often young people on the cusp, on the brink of change. Born of a family practicing slash-and-burn farming, Tarang, a boy of seven, realizes for the first time the inexpressible connection of land to life, associating his mother giving birth with rice in "the ash-covered loam, thrusting forth . . . tender stalks." After the Japanese occupation in WWII, a grade-school teacher aptly named Miss Inocencio must reconcile the skull of her lover, disinterred from the well behind her school, with her post-war reality. An immigrant student coming to America on a fellowship - perhaps a thinly disguised version of Gonzalez himself arriving at Stanford in 1949 - concocts a paranoid fantasy that the man who offers him a ride from the port of Oakland to San Francisco is a robber prepared to fling him from the Bay Bridge. Continually, Gonzalez's Pilipino characters find themselves awash in sociopolitical (under)currents, jetsam in a postcolonial ocean. A graduate student exiled to the US by the Marcos regime withdraws into idyllic memories of his island childhood but remembers also oppression and poverty; nevertheless, he finds hope in the lasting memory of a "lizard . . . mottled green and gold, aglow in the sun."

Gonzalez's craft as a writer similarly betrays a colonialized duality. In his preface, Gonzalez asserts, "In the Philippines, colonization made us into a truly submerged people"; thus his subject is constantly Pilipino, a continual project to unearth what is essential and native from underneath the American and Spanish overlays. Nevertheless, all of Gonzalez's writing is in English, and so language is a prominent (pre)occupation; even an "alien language," he asserts, "does not fail if it is employed in honest service to the scene, in evocation of the landscape, and in celebration of the people one has known from birth." More important, however, Gonzalez's prose style and narrative poetics unabashedly proceed from modernist British and American models. Gonzalez claims that "at Stanford . . . my classmates were reading Henry James [while] I toiled away to re-create Mindoro" (his native island), but his fictional constructions nonetheless echo precisely Henry James, particularly in a predilection for exploring psychological states. Another obvious influence is early James Joyce. The book's title story, "The Bread of Salt," mirrors Joyce's "Araby" in plot and theme: a young violinist, enamored of a mestiza beauty, gets a chance to impress her by playing at a party at her house, but only embarrasses himself at the buffet table. What makes Gonzalez's story crowningly Pilipino, however, is the reference to pan de sal, "bread of salt" - an allusion that embeds the violinist in a long-standing tradition of young Pilipinos sent each morning to the corner bakery to buy pan de sal for the family's breakfast.

The Bread of Salt and Other Stories is a significant book, mapping the writerly evolution of N. V. M. Gonzalez. As he himself describes it, these stories "suggest coming full circle - in the learning of one's craft, in finding a language and, finally, in discovering a country of one's own." The landscape of this "country" is ultimately transcendent, as story after story attempts, in Gonzalez's own words, to "express the ineffable," unveiling epiphany upon epiphany.

VINCE GOTERA Humboldt State University