Theres The Rub
Adrian Cristobal, writer
By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 04:38:00 12/26/2007
MANILA, Philippines -- I couldn’t help but chuckle when I saw Adrian Cristobal’s picture last Sunday accompanying Lito Zulueta’s article on him. I don’t know if that was his favorite picture, but I’ve seen it so many times, not least in this newspaper when he used to write for it, to wonder if it wasn’t so. The picture shows him in the throes of thought, a fist pressed to his chin a la Rodin’s “The Thinker,” his brow knitted in concentration, his expression not without disdain.
I remembered that one of the Ravens (I don’t recall now if it was Pick Aprieto) asked him once why he liked to scowl in public when he laughed all the time in private, particularly in the company of friends with the aid of libation. Adrian replied, laughing, that the only way you could be taken seriously by the public was if your face was set in a frown. If you smiled a lot, you would be dismissed as frivolous. Especially, he said, if you were as good-looking as he.
“A quite cynical person, possibly acquired in the practice of journalism,” Elmer Ordoñez assessed him in retrospect. I’d disagree with the “cynical.” Skeptical maybe, bitingly satirical maybe, slightly disillusioned maybe, but not cynical. I always thought Adrian was far too irreverent, sacrilegious, and mischievous to be cynical. He wore the mask of snobbery but he harbored a heart made of fluff. He was a sucker for a sob story, and all his life had been ripped off by friends and strangers who had a talent for telling it.
Adrian believed in one thing fervently, and that was writing.
The last time I saw him was exactly one month before he died last Saturday, a couple of days before I left for abroad. His daughter, Celin, had told me that Makati Med had pronounced that he had stage-four lung cancer, and I knew it was as ironclad a death sentence as could be slapped on anyone, to go by friends who had gone away that way.
I was surprised to see him in good shape and in reasonably good spirits in his hospital bed. He put down a book he was reading and greeted me, “Buti napasyal ka (Good of you to drop by).” It was about 10 p.m., most of his visitors (he had quite a crowd that day, mostly writers) had been there earlier but had already gone. When he learned I was going to London, he asked me to get him a Times Literary Supplement diary/calendar to jot his notes down on. He was old-school, surrounding himself with literary accoutrement, the pen-and-ink-type tools of writing. He had the delicate palate to go with the robust appetite.
Talk drifted to writing. He expressed envy for the times when writers and intellectuals ruled the world and had the pleasure, and excitement, of one another’s company. He wondered at some point why we couldn’t have the courage to write about the most personal things about ourselves without fear of offending some people. The great writers had done so. Celin, who has inherited her father’s irreverence, asked him why he hadn’t yet written about the loves of his life. He snorted.
Before I left, the nurse came in to take his blood pressure, chiming, “How are we feeling?” Adrian replied with mock belligerence that it wasn’t a reasonable question to ask anyone who had to endure the indignities of a hospital bed. That is how I will remember him, raging against the dying of the light in his own quiet and perfectly literary way.
He was satirical in the way that Rizal was satirical, because it suited his temperament best, because he belonged to the same tradition, when letters and learning and sophistication meant the world to the world. It’s this time of year that you miss him most because he was never one to pass up Rizal Day, having himself spoken many times at the celebrations in the Shrine. He wasn’t shrill (which unfortunately is often the only way you can make people listen to you these days), he was sly, preferring to point out national foibles with wit and subtlety. Alas, the wit and subtlety were often lost not just on the public but on their victim. I remember once that he offered faint praise to someone (whose identity is best left secret, this is Christmas after all) in a column and ended up being thanked profusely by the fellow.
Years ago, Adrian wrote a book on his other favorite Filipino, Andres Bonifacio, called “The Tragedy of the Revolution,” where he talked about the brilliance of the Katipunan having been founded by a plebeian and the benightedness of a society that was unprepared for it. That society included the revolutionaries who thought they were best led by someone with social distinction, like Emilio Aguinaldo. Adrian might have written his own epitaph there, though in a rather oblique way.
His own tragedy wasn’t that society was unprepared for him, it was that society had lost interest in people like him. In people like Franz Arcellana, Nick Joaquin, Wilfrido Nolledo, Doreen Fernandez, all of whom died in one fell swoop some years ago without grinding this world to a halt. Like Icarus falling into the sea in Breughel’s painting, to a world oblivious to it. Adrian was one of the last of a dying breed, a breed of people who loved writing and writers and wanted the world to do so, too. Alas, increasingly vainly: It’s all the country can do now to love reading, let alone writing; it’s all this country can do now to love people who think, let alone people who write.
I don’t know that Adrian ever became cynical or bitter over it. My last look at him in that hospital bed suggests he never despaired at the thought. And I do recall that one of his favorite jokes was something a writer-friend of his did during their youth. The fellow told the girl of his dreams, “I love you,” and was promptly rejected. Unfazed, the guy said: “Who cares whether you love me or not? I’m just telling you I love you.”
Maybe Adrian said that too, laughingly, before he went.
More Inquirer columns
Previous columns:
Silent nights, holy nights – 12/25/07
Yo ho ho – 12/24/07
Feudal – 12/20/07
Road to perdition – 12/19/07
Jurassic – 12/18/07
Dysfunctional – 12/17/07
Free, but... – 12/13/07
Death march – 12/12/07
Grave concerns – 12/11/07
Coming home – 12/10/07
Babel – 12/05/07
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