Reading Guide for the First Philippine Edition published by Exploding Galaxies
Considered a long lost Filipino classic, Wilfrido D. Nolledo's novel, But for the Lovers finally comes home to the Philippines more than 50 years after its initial publication in the United States in 1970 with the new Philippine edition by Exploding Galaxies.
In But for the Lovers, Hidalgo de Anuncio, a jaded Spanish vaudevillian, brings home to Ojos Verdes a girl lost in the streets of Japanese-occupied Manila. With his attendant Molave Amoran—wistful guitarist and thief—the payaso guides his lost crew through the startling grotesqueries and tragedies inside a devastated Manila.
An influential figure in Philippine literature, Nolledo was born in 1933 in Manila. Nolledo was already a published writer at the age of 14 before studying at the University of Santo Tomas. His short stories have appeared in the Philippines Free Press where he was a staff member from 1963-1966. He received numerous Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for works such as his short story “Rice Wine”. In 1966, Nolledo was given a Fulbright-Hays scholarship to attend the University of Iowa. After participating in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he eventually served as the editor of the Iowa Review. In 1972, he returned to the Philippines and wrote for various national magazines while scripting for movies. He moved back to the United States in 1990 to join his family. Nolledo died in Los Angeles in 2004.
As described by Quijano de Manila in his 1970 Philippine Free Press Review, Lakan Umali in her 2023 CNN Philippines Life Review, and the Exploding Galaxies team
A Castillian relic of road-show vaudeville, once a great clown, now merely the non-top banana on the burlesque stage of war-time Manila. Nolledo here amazingly recreates the atmosphere of decayed vaudeville and in the absurd figure of Hidalgo de Anuncio interweaves backstage vulgarity and well-bred nostalgia, Quiapo and Intramuros.
Hidalgo’s scabrous houseboy, a “night mammal… bred from four generations of squatter-scavengers in Tondo,” thief and hustler and hunter of the urban game: “Amoran loved Manila. It was his territory. Especially at night of full moon and scrawny cats and dogs. Those animals’ habits he time to the second, knowing exactly where to locate them at a given hour, how large a group was loose… Meat was the thing and the Chinese cooks who operated Manila’s fring panciterias never asked questions.”
Landlady of the boardinghouse on Calle Ojos Verdes, three times widowed, still a voracious feeder on the male meat, of which she can have her fill from those of her boarders who are behind in rent and are willing to pay in kind: “ The Sperm Count as of this morning was fifty-fifty. Four probables (two bachelors, two common-law husbands) were remaindered for active duty during the holidays. Qualitatively, at least one of these possessed physical assets negotiable in A-1 fornication… Her bulbous nose could sniff out a man’s genitals in a suit of armor.” But it’s her genteel tenant in room 13, Hidalgo de Anuncio, that landlady Tira Colombo is most in a rut to get to her basement bed. Tira Colombo is Nolledo’s earth goddess: “Her wicker chair was set down in room thirteen. Like an Ethiopian high priestess en route to the temple, the landlady had been borne up the stairs by her attendants (‘maids in wailing’) who, dusky and stolid, resembled Babylonian slaves ransomed to imperial service. Paying tenants peeked out their doors for a glimpse of their mistress (plumped up by feather cushions)... The Colombo runners returned, their reina gesticulating with fly-swatter. Singing with spears in their lungs, they pounced upon the wicker throne, bearing Tira the Terrible, aloft… She was the First Female, the Woman of the Seigneur (though Hidalgo did not know it), Queen of the Scavengers, sarap-sarap!”
A sick girl whom Hidalgo de Anuncio finds on Avenida Rizal and takes back to his room at Ojos Verdes, where, on awaking from a long sleep, she relates to an assembly the wondrous adventures of her picaresque life. She is, it turns out, the girl in the prologue. And the Philippine Symbol? “Neither an Hidalgo nor a Shigura, given all the time and giving back tyranny, would leave one mark on her that she would not somehow shed like a molting skin — being as she was that most irreducible grade of human a snake ever turned to.” What’s her name? “As long as she was a dryad among demos on pontoon bridges, as long as she was a decibel in the drum roll of the U.S. Cavalry, as long as she was a cricket in the crusts of Intramuros, and as long as she was Mandarin eyes and Malayan hair among benzedrine masks and blond cornucopia…” Maria Alma. Virgin soul.
“Creeping with exotica, its life source delineated by somnambulistic mammalia whose chief accent is the Scream, whose obsession is Survival at any price.” “Pocked with graffiti, impervious to all imaginable horrors, the property had become the progenitor of a new class culture.” Nolledo has made the boardinghouse an image of the panic world of war-crazed Manila and the various streams of consciousness that wash through it, glinting with bits of history, swell at last into a tide of racial memory.
“With her cheap perfume, artificial eyelashes and outsize kimono, Tomodachi Toni was an inhibiting presence that clients, drunk or sober, had to respect. Nights like this, despite the life-giving ring of the cash register, she was tight-lipped and testy. Nights like this she would, unfailingly think of Lucindo Pompeyo, her husband, gone nine months now without a word, and since then not even a postcard.” “...had been paying for please in the personal columns of The Manila Tribune: ‘LUCINDO COME BACK.” To this she would sometimes add, “FORGIVE ME,” or “ALL IS FORGIVEN.” Though she did not know exactly what she was forgiving.
“Maddalena rocked, Maddalena rolled her belly to a stupefied combo of flute, saxophone and castanets. Veiled but vibrant, she cruised among tippers and tricklers behind potted palms and terra cotta antiques, crunching peanut shells on a floor linoleumed with squashed flies, essence of mosquitoes and male droppings. Whiff of whiskey and turpentine tanged the dusty air.”
“Sergeant Yato, as befitted manual rote and the cliché of all sergeants, was chunky, with an overpowering grizzliness to accentuate his combat record of ten American Marines slain, six wounded, two captured. Sake-eyed from the magic fountain of his canteen (refilled by mysterious requisitions at almost every stopover depot), he saw himself as the kamikaze roughneck of beachhead landings. He was a prodigious hand-to-hand combatant, the churlish picker of souvenirs (among them, an Australian scalp), which he kept in his rucksack for instant reference.”
“None of these biographical statistics were known to Corporal Ito. At age sixteen, the draftee had not quite reached the glamour of battle fatigue. His induction was a romantic error; he toted a sleeping bag on an inner flap of which he had water-colored his fiancée’s sleepy violet eyes. From Sergeant Yato, the authentic tora, Ito had studiously copied the itchy tic, the samurai swagger, the rakish angle of cap, the boot clicking. Ito disliked intoxicating liquors of any kind—his gullet was quivery with baby acids—but he clinked tumblers with his sergeant with equal gusto.”
Called “Dark Glasses”, a lieutenant whom Nolledo gives a sort of shapeshifting quality. “Now a raffish, bearded organizer with lottery numbers in his pockets, Lieutenant Deogracias was the rebel leader subscribing a massive assault from the hills. He had led (he said) a band of cutthroats in Batangas once, which had further depleted an already diminishing Imperial Japanese Army. The time is ripe, he said: “Horas na natin!” Stymied, tenants consulted wristwatches, checked the Colombo clock, and looked at each other blankly.”
A list of other works, talks, and important reviews where you can learn more about Nolledo and But for the Lovers.
Rediscovering Nolledo, MCAD TK’s inaugural series of talks presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila and publishing house Exploding Galaxies, features the first Philippine edition of Wilfrido D. Nolledo’s But for the Lovers.
June 23, 2023: Gina Apostol in conversation with Charlson Ong
Rediscovering Nolledo: Reading But for the Lovers
July 21, 2023: Glenn Diaz in Conversation with Julian Cerna
Rediscovering Nolledo: Manila and Its Misfits
October 8, 2023: Ramon Guillermo with Karina Bolasco moderated by Lakan Umali
Rediscovering Nolledo: The Novel and Nolledo
Nick Joaquin’s Review on the Philippine Free Press 1970
Philippine Free Press, Review of Nolledo But for the Lovers (Quijano de Manila).pdf
Source:
Excerpt on Nolledo in Bien & Cynthia Lumbera’s Philippine Literature: A History & Anthology
Bienvenido Lumbera on Nolledo (1997).pdf
Source: https://archive.org/details/philippinelitera0000unse/page/191/mode/1up?q=nolledo
Time in Wilfrido D. Nolledo’s Fiction by Gerardo Z. Torres in Philippine Studies
Philippine Studies - Time in Wilfrido D. Nolledo's Fiction - Gerardo Z. Torres.pdf
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42633447
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