MANILA, Philippines -
Saturday morning, Dec. 22, 2007
Virgie Moreno’s requiem for Adrian E. Cristobal Sr.
A Raven-in-love book writer at the breakfast table
Dearly Beloved Raven,
Rising from our knees at the foot of your last bed, and because our ancestors say of our five senses, hearing is the last to go, we whispered
...
Amen. Raven, Let go! Let go!
Hadrian, the Roman emperor, naked barefoot on his golden sandals and without his crown, on facing his imperial physician on his ailing mortal body became the equal of his mortal subjects, down to his slaves. Except that when as an architect of beauty, he built an island Temple of Love, he becomes forever an Emperor.
Your quotation from Margarette Yourcenar?s Memoirs of Hadrian, your namesake.
You are freed from pain in the bone, and all that flesh is heir to.
Rescued, we pray, from the remains of disorder and nightmares of the Revolution you wrote of.
But, you would never tremble again for the fate of the littlest one who arrived?the innocent?in your house before your absence. Neither for us, who?ve staged the last lyrical elegy?we thought?one by one, and today?
Your name and face blanked out at The Breakfast Table.
You have finished with sorrow, Master Obituarist! You who had declared ahead of yourself, omnisciently, the passing of poet Jose Garcia Villa from his New York?s Limelight Café with our Raven-in Love poet Hilario S. Francia here in Café Orfeo into your regal membership of Deathless Poet?s Society.?at the Breakfast Table, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Monday, Feb. 10, 1997
How we looked up to your own flight to that Café-in-the-Sky. With such longing disguised and a wrinkle of envy masked by a smile. Left behind, seemingly excluded from your other life. Five Ravens-in-Love book writers alive, counting one fretting for you in the snows of America. While this one, the lone girl in your youth and still the only Raven woman, composing this Requiem without tears, running after your heartbeat, so soon, before the last mourner has walked out of the church steps, to pause over Diana O?s rare cheese and my hot soup, and then to plot our next Ravens-in-Love Book III, with your mantra:
?It?s not immodesty to call the Ravens or any writer for that matter, immortal. Until all books are burned, every written word, good or bad, achieves immortality. Language is immortal. Proof of this is that dead Ravens live on in these pages of Ravens II.??from the Breakfast Table, by Adrian E. Cristobal Philippine Daily Inquirer, July 30, 1998
Oy, you?re all together again. Eternally, there in that Sky Café, without us, not yet? At every birthday bash of each. Raven, you sardonically declare. We are All at the Departure Lounge.
Consoling ourselves, we now imagine that some thing like the life-size Charlie Chaplin photo on the glass door of our old Indios Café is where you entered that new?to you?Café in the Sky.
Take on your role as Raven-in-love propagandist for the new Age Arts-cinema, that in our country has taken pride of place among the seven classical arts. Live up to why our first Café was named after our propagandist Indios Bravos of more than a century ago, celebrating with a brindis the honors gained by painters Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo in Madrid?s Cafe Ingles, with Sucursals in Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Ghent?The genesis, the nesting habitats of self-made underground films: Mike Parsons? ?Dolls ... ,? Henry Francia?s ?On My Way to China, I Reached India,? Romy Vitug and Virginia R. Moreno?s ?Orfeo Marino,? the ancestor of which is Lamberto Avellana?s ?Portrait of the Filipino as Artist.?
And somewhat similar to Café Orfeo?s black lacquer bar is where Fr. James Donelan, an expert on French Cluny Tapestry, amid the new tapestry paintings of Raven Francia, would greet you with his blessings here, named after the god of music Orpheus, ?May the milk not curdle, the meats not stale, the waiters do not tire, and the guests with happiness return.? His secret rival, Benedictine Fr. Gabriel Casal, inevitably bids you share his tarama, poor Greek?s caviar, in thanksgiving to us all?writers, architects and film documentarists who signed up for his heritage dream project with the French archeologists, ?Recovery of the San Diego Manila Galleon Treasures.? All those recoveries of a fertile life in old and new arts. So you will not feel lost at first.
May you need not ask, where am I? At this strange table, before you ambrosia, whatever. Remorseful, that I did not serve you duck patotim, health-wise, on your last night here. Before your majestic resurrection of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his ?One Hundred Years of Solitude? in the new Light-on-Light Instituto Cervantes de Manila of Spanish architect Dan Javier Galvan. Too late, we learned that you couldn?t taste anymore the thinnest salt on Jamon Serrano and bitter spice of Spanish wine offered you in that last reception. Alas!
Raven, carry on! Confident in your mind intact the high pleasure you?ve evoked in your ?harem??we call ourselves?of captivated eminent ladies in literature, music, theater, dance and the young art of indie film by your charisma of presence and command of light wit over grave wisdom.
A treasure to keep on your now comfort Café. The awed discovery by the generation after us of the literature and the seven classical arts that ravish us. That ravish them today in avant-garde ways and forms:
Dancing Frida Kahlo in her cage, Myra Beltran
Serenading Frida Kahlo, Margie Evasco.
Photo-painting Frida Kahlo?s Crown of Thorns, Wawee Navarrosa.
Danny Reyes overturns his vintage Tertulia in the hallowed Rizal Library by quoting on its wall, not the poetry of Romeo and Juliet?s love scene in her tomb, but the doomed lovers before the outbreak of World War II in a bath tub, taken from the English Patient film:
?When were you most happy?? asks Katherine.
?Now,? replies Count Almasy.
?When were you least happy??
?Now,? replies Count Almasy.
Sculptress Julie Lluch and her Dalena daughters project history in an indie film, ?Memories of a Forgotten War.?
So here?s to you, Raven! Salut! Cheers!
Enacting the usual welcome by raising their favorite drinks and calling out their old nicknames:
Small beer from the mouth of a San Mig bottle. Nicoo?de mus Joaquin. Honorary Raven!
Russian vodka straight. Mang Larry. Nafaric (in reverse of) Francia. Raven Original.
Martini cold. Xoxy, sexy Jose Garcia Villa. Self-elected Raven.
French wine labeled Saint Raphael. The Silence when drank by monk-like Ravens, turning contemplative after midnight.
Lest you forget where you came from, how you first learned to drink tagay cup to cup exchange of lambanog wine from your Lukban home town at the foot of Mt. Banahaw. You are at home. Nothing missing.
When I get there ? in time, I promise Rothschilde champagne. You all know why. Their love in the manner of emperors for the most coveted arts of the world that the family Rothschilde loaded safely out on the last train from a war-besieged Paris. Again, why you deserve royal champagne?remember, how we acted in the first Artists Ball at the war-ruins of Melian Court? To raise funds for artists and writers impaired by the war through a Tunnel of Love for which entrance fees we carefully pooled to crawl through it. On emerging, we faced the crowded exhibits of early masters Arturo Luz to Vicente Manansala. Around the fringes, from the unsold paintings of a young unknown Lee Aguinaldo, you gifted us one from pocket money you borrowed from us! In the manner of a young Adrian named after an emperor in love with Beauty.
In the Café banquet above and the Café below; here is the fabulous dessert.
Ice-Cream Chrysantheme
To make ice-cream chrysantheme
Mix Christ and Chrysanthemums
In a bowl of turkiz amethyst
To make ice-cream chrysantheme
But since Christ is not so easy
(You must hunt him first among
The white shadows of black birds
With a mask upon your shoulder
And a rose upon your eyes!)
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
To ice-cream chrysantheme
Jose Garcia Villa,
?Poem 41?
Very few would ignore you thereafter. Ka Amado, Tagalog poet and labor militant just freed from prison, with his black coffee and his wife zarzuela actress Aling Atang de la Rama, the first Muse, legend says, of a rival poet, Jose Corazon de Jesus, listened raptly to this new menu of poetry in Café Indios Bravos. Knowing well the figures of the Philippine Revolution, Ka Amado recognized this Xoxy Villa (however unlikely) as the son of the Surgeon-General Simeon Villa of the Revolutionary Army. And from the eminent historian Carlos Quirino, you are the grand nephew of scholar-patriot Don Epifanio Cristobal de los Santos, honored with the shortest Diliman bus sign, EDSA, for the longest artery through Greater Manila now.
Certainly it is not the master Thomas Mann who would snub you, even if he preferred Café Florian to your sitting in Café Quadri, across the greatest salon Piazza San Marco of the world.
Mann who wrote Death in Venice of his character, Gustave Aschenbach, would meet you and your character El Pichon, dying with his enemy Dandolo in your last fiction ?Visitation in Venice.? Neither of you would be lonely?never as lonely as the Victor who laid down his arms ? Dandolo?s defeat seemed his Pichon?s own defeat. Though it was the triumph of truth in Beauty?Venice flooded, Venice sunken, Venice rising!
When H.R.H. Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej as Royal Sponsor had your name etched on marble in the Authors Lounge of Oriental Mandarin Hotel as one of the Distinguished Writers of Literature in Asean, since it is in your power to do so and in the largesse of your heart, you had us called to follow your name. To sleep and wake up in the same Mandarin Hotel?s heritage rooms from where E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad to William Golding woke up to the scent of papayas and cruise the serene Chao Praya river. How much of Conrad?s Electric Affinity was sparked there and fired later in the tumultuous filming by Francis Ford Coppola in our Pagsanjan river banks of ?Apocalypse Now??
In the ?Celestine Prophecy? you lent us the theme evolved is that nothing is coincidental in nature and in human creations. All are intersticed, in time, to be related, meanings exposed, and their sterling values counted. From the list of Ravens-in-Love Book I, II, III in their bare facts, no one as yet has calibrated what is the meaning of one King?s conferment of Royal Honors on writers of a country in a Republic. You say jestingly that we acquire royalty as creators under the public rank of Humanists. That you are your character I, Suliman, young Rajah of the old Kingdom of Tondo while we all answer to the name of Humanist, Ravens-in-Love who resurrect each time with dispassionate joy the beauty of human life in making literature, joy in its antique sense of wholeness that is and at once modern in its exuberance. Relative to that Mandarin Emperor of China with a difference, as the Humanist who knows not alone when to cut a man?s head in winter that the cold may not chill the rest of his empire?s bones but when to tell which painting is waverly or masterly done. How with what regal tenderness he keeps the royal scroll paintings as a passport to his immortality, even as he lets a man?s head go with out a pang.
Our Humanist mark is not a robber of life, but a spouse.
Concerned that works of Ravens-in-Love book writers could be abandoned, unread, an astute publisher-entrepreneur on seeing the Santuario wall of flowers, the banks of flowers, trillions of blooms, in your first night?s wake, he proposed that if the lilies of the valley, carnations, roses, orchids, tulips, to chrysanthemums were to be auctioned off to the rich and famous present, each bid in sum would be enough to buy off all worthy books in PowerBooks, Fully Booked and National?wide outlets in this archipelago. To fill up the empty shelves of all public libraries for book-famished readers.
To read a book, as one critic says, of a novel that raises a tropical scene like that of Pagsanjan, is to enter a climate.
?Half an hour before light I am woken by the sound of rain. Rain on wall, coconut and pets ? my body must remember everything, this insect bite, smell of wet fruit, the slow sneaking of light.?
But to make a poem, This Requiem, is to enter a soul. The subtler aristocracy of one who writes imagined literature beyond your daily bread at the Breakfast Table, you share with Nick Joaquin in his Small Beer column, as with those writing history-on-the run while dreaming of poetry, ?Princes by night, clock-punchers by tomorrow.?
For all the tears shed, the epitaphs of praises from friends to foes, the scent of Eau d?Adrien last Christmas, your last, that you gifted us, in the manner of a richer Adrian when you left this morning, receive my ?Perfume Prayer?:
Lord Healer! Lord Embalmer!
Exhale now Your root, aloe, wine, honey
Myrrh of Perfume Flower
Into his mouth without tongue, into his ears without drum.
Breathing incense
Ash, distilled from the smoking dead
Of all man?s wars, he must wake fragrant, singing,
Whole, but without his enemy, his knife.
Raven-in-love book writer
Virginia R. Moreno
Café Orfeo
Copyright 2012 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Saturday morning, Dec. 22, 2007
Virgie Moreno’s requiem for Adrian E. Cristobal Sr.
A Raven-in-love book writer at the breakfast table
Dearly Beloved Raven,
Rising from our knees at the foot of your last bed, and because our ancestors say of our five senses, hearing is the last to go, we whispered
...
Amen. Raven, Let go! Let go!
Hadrian, the Roman emperor, naked barefoot on his golden sandals and without his crown, on facing his imperial physician on his ailing mortal body became the equal of his mortal subjects, down to his slaves. Except that when as an architect of beauty, he built an island Temple of Love, he becomes forever an Emperor.
Your quotation from Margarette Yourcenar?s Memoirs of Hadrian, your namesake.
You are freed from pain in the bone, and all that flesh is heir to.
Rescued, we pray, from the remains of disorder and nightmares of the Revolution you wrote of.
But, you would never tremble again for the fate of the littlest one who arrived?the innocent?in your house before your absence. Neither for us, who?ve staged the last lyrical elegy?we thought?one by one, and today?
Your name and face blanked out at The Breakfast Table.
You have finished with sorrow, Master Obituarist! You who had declared ahead of yourself, omnisciently, the passing of poet Jose Garcia Villa from his New York?s Limelight Café with our Raven-in Love poet Hilario S. Francia here in Café Orfeo into your regal membership of Deathless Poet?s Society.?at the Breakfast Table, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Monday, Feb. 10, 1997
How we looked up to your own flight to that Café-in-the-Sky. With such longing disguised and a wrinkle of envy masked by a smile. Left behind, seemingly excluded from your other life. Five Ravens-in-Love book writers alive, counting one fretting for you in the snows of America. While this one, the lone girl in your youth and still the only Raven woman, composing this Requiem without tears, running after your heartbeat, so soon, before the last mourner has walked out of the church steps, to pause over Diana O?s rare cheese and my hot soup, and then to plot our next Ravens-in-Love Book III, with your mantra:
?It?s not immodesty to call the Ravens or any writer for that matter, immortal. Until all books are burned, every written word, good or bad, achieves immortality. Language is immortal. Proof of this is that dead Ravens live on in these pages of Ravens II.??from the Breakfast Table, by Adrian E. Cristobal Philippine Daily Inquirer, July 30, 1998
Oy, you?re all together again. Eternally, there in that Sky Café, without us, not yet? At every birthday bash of each. Raven, you sardonically declare. We are All at the Departure Lounge.
Consoling ourselves, we now imagine that some thing like the life-size Charlie Chaplin photo on the glass door of our old Indios Café is where you entered that new?to you?Café in the Sky.
Take on your role as Raven-in-love propagandist for the new Age Arts-cinema, that in our country has taken pride of place among the seven classical arts. Live up to why our first Café was named after our propagandist Indios Bravos of more than a century ago, celebrating with a brindis the honors gained by painters Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo in Madrid?s Cafe Ingles, with Sucursals in Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Ghent?The genesis, the nesting habitats of self-made underground films: Mike Parsons? ?Dolls ... ,? Henry Francia?s ?On My Way to China, I Reached India,? Romy Vitug and Virginia R. Moreno?s ?Orfeo Marino,? the ancestor of which is Lamberto Avellana?s ?Portrait of the Filipino as Artist.?
And somewhat similar to Café Orfeo?s black lacquer bar is where Fr. James Donelan, an expert on French Cluny Tapestry, amid the new tapestry paintings of Raven Francia, would greet you with his blessings here, named after the god of music Orpheus, ?May the milk not curdle, the meats not stale, the waiters do not tire, and the guests with happiness return.? His secret rival, Benedictine Fr. Gabriel Casal, inevitably bids you share his tarama, poor Greek?s caviar, in thanksgiving to us all?writers, architects and film documentarists who signed up for his heritage dream project with the French archeologists, ?Recovery of the San Diego Manila Galleon Treasures.? All those recoveries of a fertile life in old and new arts. So you will not feel lost at first.
May you need not ask, where am I? At this strange table, before you ambrosia, whatever. Remorseful, that I did not serve you duck patotim, health-wise, on your last night here. Before your majestic resurrection of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his ?One Hundred Years of Solitude? in the new Light-on-Light Instituto Cervantes de Manila of Spanish architect Dan Javier Galvan. Too late, we learned that you couldn?t taste anymore the thinnest salt on Jamon Serrano and bitter spice of Spanish wine offered you in that last reception. Alas!
Raven, carry on! Confident in your mind intact the high pleasure you?ve evoked in your ?harem??we call ourselves?of captivated eminent ladies in literature, music, theater, dance and the young art of indie film by your charisma of presence and command of light wit over grave wisdom.
A treasure to keep on your now comfort Café. The awed discovery by the generation after us of the literature and the seven classical arts that ravish us. That ravish them today in avant-garde ways and forms:
Dancing Frida Kahlo in her cage, Myra Beltran
Serenading Frida Kahlo, Margie Evasco.
Photo-painting Frida Kahlo?s Crown of Thorns, Wawee Navarrosa.
Danny Reyes overturns his vintage Tertulia in the hallowed Rizal Library by quoting on its wall, not the poetry of Romeo and Juliet?s love scene in her tomb, but the doomed lovers before the outbreak of World War II in a bath tub, taken from the English Patient film:
?When were you most happy?? asks Katherine.
?Now,? replies Count Almasy.
?When were you least happy??
?Now,? replies Count Almasy.
Sculptress Julie Lluch and her Dalena daughters project history in an indie film, ?Memories of a Forgotten War.?
So here?s to you, Raven! Salut! Cheers!
Enacting the usual welcome by raising their favorite drinks and calling out their old nicknames:
Small beer from the mouth of a San Mig bottle. Nicoo?de mus Joaquin. Honorary Raven!
Russian vodka straight. Mang Larry. Nafaric (in reverse of) Francia. Raven Original.
Martini cold. Xoxy, sexy Jose Garcia Villa. Self-elected Raven.
French wine labeled Saint Raphael. The Silence when drank by monk-like Ravens, turning contemplative after midnight.
Lest you forget where you came from, how you first learned to drink tagay cup to cup exchange of lambanog wine from your Lukban home town at the foot of Mt. Banahaw. You are at home. Nothing missing.
When I get there ? in time, I promise Rothschilde champagne. You all know why. Their love in the manner of emperors for the most coveted arts of the world that the family Rothschilde loaded safely out on the last train from a war-besieged Paris. Again, why you deserve royal champagne?remember, how we acted in the first Artists Ball at the war-ruins of Melian Court? To raise funds for artists and writers impaired by the war through a Tunnel of Love for which entrance fees we carefully pooled to crawl through it. On emerging, we faced the crowded exhibits of early masters Arturo Luz to Vicente Manansala. Around the fringes, from the unsold paintings of a young unknown Lee Aguinaldo, you gifted us one from pocket money you borrowed from us! In the manner of a young Adrian named after an emperor in love with Beauty.
In the Café banquet above and the Café below; here is the fabulous dessert.
Ice-Cream Chrysantheme
To make ice-cream chrysantheme
Mix Christ and Chrysanthemums
In a bowl of turkiz amethyst
To make ice-cream chrysantheme
But since Christ is not so easy
(You must hunt him first among
The white shadows of black birds
With a mask upon your shoulder
And a rose upon your eyes!)
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
To ice-cream chrysantheme
Jose Garcia Villa,
?Poem 41?
Very few would ignore you thereafter. Ka Amado, Tagalog poet and labor militant just freed from prison, with his black coffee and his wife zarzuela actress Aling Atang de la Rama, the first Muse, legend says, of a rival poet, Jose Corazon de Jesus, listened raptly to this new menu of poetry in Café Indios Bravos. Knowing well the figures of the Philippine Revolution, Ka Amado recognized this Xoxy Villa (however unlikely) as the son of the Surgeon-General Simeon Villa of the Revolutionary Army. And from the eminent historian Carlos Quirino, you are the grand nephew of scholar-patriot Don Epifanio Cristobal de los Santos, honored with the shortest Diliman bus sign, EDSA, for the longest artery through Greater Manila now.
Certainly it is not the master Thomas Mann who would snub you, even if he preferred Café Florian to your sitting in Café Quadri, across the greatest salon Piazza San Marco of the world.
Mann who wrote Death in Venice of his character, Gustave Aschenbach, would meet you and your character El Pichon, dying with his enemy Dandolo in your last fiction ?Visitation in Venice.? Neither of you would be lonely?never as lonely as the Victor who laid down his arms ? Dandolo?s defeat seemed his Pichon?s own defeat. Though it was the triumph of truth in Beauty?Venice flooded, Venice sunken, Venice rising!
When H.R.H. Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej as Royal Sponsor had your name etched on marble in the Authors Lounge of Oriental Mandarin Hotel as one of the Distinguished Writers of Literature in Asean, since it is in your power to do so and in the largesse of your heart, you had us called to follow your name. To sleep and wake up in the same Mandarin Hotel?s heritage rooms from where E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad to William Golding woke up to the scent of papayas and cruise the serene Chao Praya river. How much of Conrad?s Electric Affinity was sparked there and fired later in the tumultuous filming by Francis Ford Coppola in our Pagsanjan river banks of ?Apocalypse Now??
In the ?Celestine Prophecy? you lent us the theme evolved is that nothing is coincidental in nature and in human creations. All are intersticed, in time, to be related, meanings exposed, and their sterling values counted. From the list of Ravens-in-Love Book I, II, III in their bare facts, no one as yet has calibrated what is the meaning of one King?s conferment of Royal Honors on writers of a country in a Republic. You say jestingly that we acquire royalty as creators under the public rank of Humanists. That you are your character I, Suliman, young Rajah of the old Kingdom of Tondo while we all answer to the name of Humanist, Ravens-in-Love who resurrect each time with dispassionate joy the beauty of human life in making literature, joy in its antique sense of wholeness that is and at once modern in its exuberance. Relative to that Mandarin Emperor of China with a difference, as the Humanist who knows not alone when to cut a man?s head in winter that the cold may not chill the rest of his empire?s bones but when to tell which painting is waverly or masterly done. How with what regal tenderness he keeps the royal scroll paintings as a passport to his immortality, even as he lets a man?s head go with out a pang.
Our Humanist mark is not a robber of life, but a spouse.
Concerned that works of Ravens-in-Love book writers could be abandoned, unread, an astute publisher-entrepreneur on seeing the Santuario wall of flowers, the banks of flowers, trillions of blooms, in your first night?s wake, he proposed that if the lilies of the valley, carnations, roses, orchids, tulips, to chrysanthemums were to be auctioned off to the rich and famous present, each bid in sum would be enough to buy off all worthy books in PowerBooks, Fully Booked and National?wide outlets in this archipelago. To fill up the empty shelves of all public libraries for book-famished readers.
To read a book, as one critic says, of a novel that raises a tropical scene like that of Pagsanjan, is to enter a climate.
?Half an hour before light I am woken by the sound of rain. Rain on wall, coconut and pets ? my body must remember everything, this insect bite, smell of wet fruit, the slow sneaking of light.?
But to make a poem, This Requiem, is to enter a soul. The subtler aristocracy of one who writes imagined literature beyond your daily bread at the Breakfast Table, you share with Nick Joaquin in his Small Beer column, as with those writing history-on-the run while dreaming of poetry, ?Princes by night, clock-punchers by tomorrow.?
For all the tears shed, the epitaphs of praises from friends to foes, the scent of Eau d?Adrien last Christmas, your last, that you gifted us, in the manner of a richer Adrian when you left this morning, receive my ?Perfume Prayer?:
Lord Healer! Lord Embalmer!
Exhale now Your root, aloe, wine, honey
Myrrh of Perfume Flower
Into his mouth without tongue, into his ears without drum.
Breathing incense
Ash, distilled from the smoking dead
Of all man?s wars, he must wake fragrant, singing,
Whole, but without his enemy, his knife.
Raven-in-love book writer
Virginia R. Moreno
Café Orfeo
Copyright 2012 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
