Bienvenido N. Santos

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Death in Life in Santos's Villa Magdalena

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SOURCE: Reyes, Soledad S. “Death in Life in Santos's Villa Magdalena.” In Reading Bienvenido N. Santos, edited by Isagani R. Cruz and David Jonathan Bayot, pp. 219-44. Manila, Philippines: DLSU Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, which was originally a lecture delivered in 1975, Reyes examines the central themes of Villa Magdalena and places the novel within the tradition of Philippine literature in English.]

In 1965, Bienvenido N. Santos published his first novel, Villa Magdalena,1 which one critic considers a “proof of the dimension of Santos's art.” Prior to the publication of the novel, Santos had already been identified as a short story writer whose forte was re-creating vividly the plight of the Filipino expatriates in the United States. In You Lovely People and The Day the Dancers Came, he had written of Filipino exiles abroad—Ambo, Fil, Celestino Fabia, and a host of other characters estranged from the country of their birth.2 There was compassion in the delineation of characters, poignancy in the reenactment of events and lyrical tenderness in the evocation of sights and sounds. There was general competence in technique.

In perspective, Villa Magdalena is no mean feat for a writer whose writings have long been associated with an area of experience narrowly limited to that encountered by Filipinos abroad. In the novel, Santos tries to show that he too can deal with realities confronting contemporary Philippine society as well.

The novels of the 1960s should be seen as parts of a pattern that characterizes modern Philippine literature in English. It is the almost obsessive search for the self in a world where various forces collide with frightening regularity and with tremendous impact on the national and individual psyche. As literary attempts to define the so-called Filipino sensibility, these novels encompass large segments of society against which certain recurring character types act out their roles. Moreover, the novels seek to reflect some of the principal preoccupations which are intimately related to this quest for national identity.

As early as the 1920s and 1930s, Filipino writers had been exhorted to deal with recognizable Philippine experience. Thus in the 1930s, writing in English already exhibited this preoccupation with native experience. The writings of Arguilla, Daguio and even da Costa attest to this. But in general, what was produced were mostly vignettes of Philippine life—tales, legends and short stories which because of their nature could not contain a sustained, exhaustive examination of aspects of lived life. There was a proliferation of literary pieces whose only claim to fame was their exquisite perfection of form (Arguilla's early stories or even Rotor's collection) and not very much else besides.

In what is generally considered as a fertile period in Philippine writing in English (the 1960s), some writers attempted to go beyond a superficial study of native material. Constantly drawing on the most advanced technical innovations, even as they self-consciously explored the different facets of reality, the writers seemed to have succeeded in fusing manner and matter. Consequently, ample proof was offered that the writer had not only made himself a part of Western literary tradition; he had also made himself a vivid reflector of society at crossroads straddling the worlds of tradition and modernism.

A vast panoramic view characterizes these novels in English. In point of time, it could be a whole era (Ty-Casper's The Peninsulars), the first half of the twentieth century (Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels or Santos's second novel The Volcano). Almost always, at least two generations are involved. The world where the events happen has also been magnified. It could be as wide and as diverse as two continents—Asia and America—as depicted in Gonzalez's The Bamboo Dancers or The Pretenders by F. Sionil-Jose.3 When set in the Philippines, the novels inevitably feature the teeming city of Manila or a whole province as in Polotan's Hand of the Enemy and Gonzalez's A Season of Grace.4

Villa Magdalena is not an exception to this general rule. The events covered in the novel span three generations, and include a motley of characters drawn from different segments of society. Dotting the temporal landscape created in the novel are interweaving patterns of trends, movements, beliefs and perspectives, dizzying in their diversity and complexity. There are the Spanish elements that have survived into the present period. There are the influences exerted by the American colonizers. There are the effects, mostly disastrous, of the short-lived Japanese period. All these the novel seeks to capture in its imaginative representation of life.

EDUCATION OF THE HERO

The story opens as Alfredo Medallada prepares for his flight to New York via Tokyo. He is a business executive of a flourishing leather company and is married to Nora Conde, the niece of the owner, Don Magno Medallada. The latter has specifically ordered him to contact Isabel, another niece, and later on to proceed to New York to confer with an American expert on the problem of getting rid of the strong unpleasant smell that clings to the finished products made from leather. Throughout the story, there is a consistent reference to a constantly shifting series of events in the past juxtaposed with the present situation.

The story is told from Alfredo's point of view. It is his consciousness which registers various impressions of the different characters and events in the novel. It is he who serves as a filter through whom the various forces at work in the lives of the characters are revealed, even as they themselves help to mould the central sensibility. If the central character is to be found in Alfredo, the narrator of the story, the central symbol (in the maze of confusing symbolic details in the story) is to be found in the title itself, Villa Magdalena, which appears in the novel as the mansion where the Condex and the Medalladas live. These two—Alfredo and Villa Magdalena—stand at opposite poles. How they become inextricably fused as the story ends is the gist of the novel.

Toward the end of the novel, Villa Magdalena is described in the following manner:

There was still something grand about the Villa even if it stood in the shadows and decay seemed to have set in, in corners and posts bruised by the pathways of termites and in the age scratched on the faces of those who still live here, the loyal menial who could only echo back the words that came to her, and in the stubborn dreamer of riches, or where war had touched a garden wall and death and loss left their marks on the bodies and minds of those who had lived there.

(p. 271)

This vivid description of the mansion can be taken as a summary of everything that has transpired in the novel. The mansion takes on an additional function as a witness of all that is to be chronicled in the lives of its inhabitants.

In the same way, Alfredo looks back at the past from the dizzying heights of success that is now his. With bitterness, he admits that his life has so far amounted to nothing. All his life he has lived with illusions which he has tried to pass off, at least to himself, as the only realities worth living for.

I fed on illusions for as long as I could, but I didn't call them by their name; they were what I lived by in the harried and heavy air I breathed; the little chinks of brightness in corners that made me happy that I had eyes to see, otherwise how could I have lived through it?

(p. 4)

Alfredo Medallada's education starts in a barrio in Pampanga where his father is an ordinary tenant-farmer. Life is hard and the family has to live in debt season after season. The farmers complain against the landlords who are interested only in more profit while the peasants have nothing to live on. But they realize that they can do nothing to correct the imbalance. Alfredo's father spends his time reading the Bible, searching for something that will free them from this life.

He preferred reading his Bible and pretending he knew more about the hidden meaning of the words of God's favorites, as he called God's disciples, to adding more nipa thatch to our leaking roof.

(p. 10)

He finally leaves for Manila (the promised land for many provincianos) and takes his family along with him. In Sulucan, the family is readily accepted by the people who come mostly from Pampanga.

By fetching water for the neighbors, Alfredo's father is able to earn a few centavos. There is much kindness but not much money in Sulucan. Seeing the impossibility of sending his son to school, he approaches the great Don Magno Medallada who comes from the same town. In order to impress Don Magno, Alfredo recites several passages extolling the virtues of truthfulness, piety, and courage. The rich man agrees to support the bright boy (who has also come with glowing recommendations from Mr. Gatbonton, the acting principal) through high school and college.

At first Alfredo is treated as an ordinary servant. His chores are those of a houseboy—scrubbing the floor, cleaning the windows, running errands. Later on, during his college years, he serves as the driver and messenger of Don Magno. Much later, the boy known as Pedong in Sulucan will become Don Alfredo Medallada. The rooms he has occupied through the years are indications of his gradually rising importance in the Villa. From the dark store room, he is assigned one of the guest rooms. From the guest room to the most important room in the house is just a step away.

He is initiated into another world at Villa Magdalena, where poverty and hunger do not rear their ugly heads. What Alfredo finds instead are the problems, difficulties and neuroses of the rich. Inevitably, his life becomes hopelessly entangled with the desperate lives of the inhabitants of the big house. He becomes a witness to the realities of birth and death, loyalty and betrayal, bitter clashes of personalities, disillusionment and tragedy. In most of these events, Alfredo finds himself being drawn closer, as the years pass, to the maelstrom, until in the end he discovers himself in the unenviable position vacated by the much hated Don Magno Medallada.

As an ordinary servant, he witnesses the birth of Elisa, the child of a loveless marriage between the handsome and aristocratic Doctor Vidal (a Spanish mestizo) and the beautiful Conde, Isabel, an heiress in her own right. Alfredo looks on as the marriage gradually deteriorates. The husband gambles continuously and the wife shamelessly pursues later the much younger Sol. Betraying his naivete, Alfredo refuses adamantly to believe that a Conde woman can stoop so low, despite Sol's disclosure of his relationship with the married woman. Alfredo accidentally finds out the truth and he feels “sick, unable to shake off the trembling.”

Later on, Sol and Isabel elope to Tokyo even as Dr. Vidal is dying of leprosy in the hospital. Elisa is left in the Villa. The truth is withheld from both her father and herself. One morning, the doctor is found dead in his room and an autopsy reveals that he has committed suicide, for he has been a doomed man afflicted with both tuberculosis and leprosy. With Vidal dead and Isabel in Tokyo, Elisa is left in the Villa.

In spite of the recent death and the scandal, life goes on in the mansion. Life inextricably involves the bitter feud between Don Magno and Doña Asuncion, the invalid sister of Doña Magdalena. Don Magno's wife, Dona Asuncion made no secret of what she thought of Don Magno, “a mere interloper, an upstart from a remote village who was now bent on going up in the world on the strength of his marriage to a wealthy woman” (p. 60). With anger and condescension, she follows him about, constantly reminding him that Villa Magdalena is hers and her sister's and can never be Don Magno's. She tells her sister that he married her for her money. In the clash of two persons she loves most, Doña Magdalena can only cry.

When Don Magno loses his temper and cries that he is the master of Villa Magdalena, there is no stopping Doña Asuncion as she heaps all forms of abuse on her brother-in-law.

You're not my master. Villa Magdalena is not yours. Find out for yourself. Everybody knows that Villa Magdalena was built on our money. You were a pauper, Magno, you were a nobody, have you forgotten that?

(p. 61)

Despite his monogrammed shirt, silk underthings, the ubiquituous title Don and all the trappings of wealth, Don Magno has not learned to use a linen napkin during meals. He continues to wipe his hands and his lips on the edge of the table cloth.

But among the characters in the Villa, it is Don Magno who really educates Alfredo in the ways of the world. He professes to love his wife and yet he indulges himself in a retinue of young and beautiful mistresses. Alfredo is his willing accomplice in his marital deceits, as he willingly carries messages to and from Don Magno. Later, after his graduation from college, he is trained in many aspects of the tanning business. At first he feels uncomfortable for he is the old man's protege and he is afraid that the other people connected with the business will resent him. Later, however, his fears are resolved:

There was no envy, no hatred towards me because everybody took for granted that I was taking over some day. Instead, now I found employees going out of their way to be nice to me.

(p. 115)

This makes Alfredo feel very, very good; he is immensely pleased.

At this point, Alfredo is willing to play along. He owes absolute gratitude to the old man for after all it was the Don who gave him the chance to escape poverty. He closes his eyes to Don Magno's crooked business transactions. He remains silent even if Don Magno ignores all his efforts and gets all the credit for Alfredo's brilliant economic strategies. He even brushes away the persistent questions and suspicions in his mind:

Questions, questions, mostly questions arising from fear that there might be in Don Magno's powerful mind things that were contrary to my own personal interests … Meanwhile, I didn't care what sort of a tool I was getting to be as long as there was hope in what I considered then the only thing that mattered in my life: Nora. I loved her truly.

(p. 115)

The first time he saw Nora, while he was still an ordinary servant, he knew that he loved her, or so he said to himself. As he steadily gains influence in the firm, his love for her remains despite Nora's deliberate rejection of Alfredo. She apparently does not care for him. She showers all her attention on Nick, a rich, handsome playboy. This is a classic case of romantic love between a poor man and a rich girl. He himself admits that she represents everything he wants in life—beauty, wealth, and social position. In short, she is what he would like to be. He indulges in self-pity as he compares himself with her sophisticated and rich admirers. He does not belong, at least not at this point.

The slums of Sulucan were still about me; peasant was clearly written on my face. I wanted to run to my room and hide.

(p. 72)

Alfredo turns his attention to Manang, a pretty cigarette factory worker he meets in Sulucan. They have an affair that at first promises to make him forget the rich girl. But somehow, Manang's love cannot take the place of Nora's love.

Then one day, Nora unaccountably enters his room and gives herself to him. They have to get married right after her graduation because she fears that she might be pregnant. War breaks out. The leather company fares badly since there are no contracts to be signed. Even the family's ship, the S. S. Don Magno is confiscated by the Japanese. Then a two-fold tragedy strikes Villa Magdalena. Doña Asuncion dies and Doña Magdalena loses her mind. Doña Magdalena's illness has probably more impact than Doña Asuncion's death, for it is during her fits of insanity that Dona Magdalena acts out a role comparable to the Furies, perpetually hounding the guilty inhabitants of the Villa.

What started out as a passionate affair has been quenched. Love between Alfredo, now a top-ranking executive in the leather firm (this is after the war) and Nora, still childless, has dwindled to indifference. In the throes of lovelessness, Alfredo takes notice of Elisa, now a beautiful young lady studying medicine. Elisa has an affair with him even though she suspects that he still loves Nora. Because of the furtiveness of their affair, Alfredo is suddenly assailed by doubts:

The old questions came up again, scratching like hard fingers that left slivers of blood on the flesh: who knew, who saw, as in the past, the secret shadows struggling in the deeper darkness of Villa Magdalena? When we stood under the lights, could they tell on our faces, were there marks on our cheeks, the faintest odor on her fingers? Did the old man know?

(p. 203)

The past comes to a halt as soon as Alfredo arrives in San Francisco. He is informed by Nora through a letter that she has decided to run away with Nick. She says:

It was as much a life of lies, living with you, pretending love where there was none, and never had been. I married you … well, I thought I was going to have a baby, but apart from that, I wanted to hurt Nick. I knew he had a girl, but I didn't know till later that they were living together, that she was going to have a baby. I hated him. I wanted to hurt him so much, I thought that the only way was for me to give myself to you and forget him.

(p. 241)

In this emotional letter (perhaps the first time that she elects to tell the truth), Nora reveals her motives in marrying Alfredo. Like Don Magno, Nora Conde has used him to satisfy her lust for vengeance, without foreseeing the pathetic results of her impetuous action.

Isabel and Nora, both beautiful Condes, have taken the easy way out, fleeing with their lovers, hoping against hope that the past will never overtake them. Ironically, Nora ends her letter by saying that he should spare Elisa the truth about her and Nick. Elisa, as far as Nora is concerned is the “only remaining Conde who has not sullied the name.” Alfredo is informed that Elisa has died of a strange car accident. His only chance at real happiness is now gone.

As the novel ends, every living Conde and Medallada returns to Villa Magdalena to mourn for the dead. What started as fight from the Villa and everything that it stood for, inevitably ends in return to the same place. The disconsolate Isabel expresses the firm hold the Villa has over them:

Oh, Villa Magdalena will be full of us, the living and the dead and the dying, we shall all be together. We shall all get used to one another and no longer ask, who is living, who is dead. Nothing shall separate us ever until the roof of the Villa and its walls fall upon us. From now on, no more flights for us. We have come to stay, Don Magno. All of us.

(p. 267)

Alfredo realizes that unlike Dr. Vidal, Elisa's father who chose to commit suicide rather than face shame, he will go on living, travelling over the world in endless flight. His last gesture is to ask the servant to open all the windows, for the house has been shut up like a tomb. And once more, he feels the “cool breeze, fresh and sweet, like the touch of a new season.” He can now breathe freely again.

Alfredo Medallada's education is complete. From the simple Pedong from Sulucan, he has, by dint of sheer luck, become Don Alfredo Medallada. His rise to fame and fortune has been abetted by his willingness to be molded into the image of his patron and benefactor, Don Magno Medallada, whose mantle he now assumes. From the naive, inexperienced Pedong, he has changed into the knowledgeable, influential, ruthless member of the upper class. He should therefore be happy for his ambition has been fulfilled.

And yet as the novel ends, Alfredo is sick—emotionally, physically, spiritually. For the truth of the matter is that this long agonizing process of witnessing and being involved in countless lies, duplicity and treachery is not an education that brings about self-knowledge.

A CRITIQUE OF PHILIPPINE SOCIETY

Santos presents both the dying aristocracy and newly rich in a bad light. Both groups of the upper class suffer from some moral and psychological guilt. Don Magno and Doña Asuncion, in their unique ways, offend the sensibility of any self-respecting Filipino. As types, they represent the worst traits of the moneyed class—rotten idealism, uncalled-for arrogance, unbridled lust, manipulation of people, and other excesses to which Alfredo is a passive witness and later an active participant.

Nothing is held sacred in the novel—not the politicians, the denizens of gambling joints, the crooked generals of the army, the corrupt business community, prostitution, the frivolous way of the rich, even the kind of excessive passion they feel. The poor are also held in ridicule. The laziness of the farmers, their appalling conformity to the status quo which has oppressed them from time immemorial (note the kind of man Alfredo's father is), their overwhelming fanaticism and superstition which enable an illiterate preacher like Maestro Buan to amass millions of pesos from his faithfuls' weekly contributions. He has become so rich that he is able to buy the vacant lot adjoining Villa Magdalena and build a magnificent cathedral there:

The new owner was the titular head and founder of a religious cult known as the Faithful. Its members never referred to him by his real name, Modesto Buan, but by the reverent title Ama or Father. It was a past growing religious sect and many of the converts come from Sulucan and other districts along the waterfront and from farms outside the city, all over the archipelago, among the peasants, the laborers, the unemployed.

(p. 15)

It is among these people, where pessimism abounds, that Ama has successfully introduced his religion. This religion is the only way out for the poor people.

In the novel, there is only one place where Alfredo feels happiness. This is Sulucan, a place of dirt and squalor. The place is vivid and bathed in light as Alfredo sees it again one Christmas eve after he has escaped from the oppressive atmosphere in the Villa:

The streets leading to the chapel were lined with vendors selling suman, puto bumbong, empanada, and cuchinta, truly Christmas fare. What if the cake stuck to the roof of your mouth and you had difficulty washing it off with tea and you had to remove it with your finger, turning away from the pretty girl laughing away at your predicament? … It was all right, your girl friend enjoyed it, and the walk in the half-dark streets towards the church was a precious memory.

(78)

He returns once again after living in the Villa for a couple of years. At first everybody is different. He has become a legend—the poor boy who made good, but he feels alien among them. But it is in this place where he meets Manang, a girl he has promised to love forever and with her he spends some of his happiest moments. The feeling that his place is really in Sulucan and not Villa Magdalena haunts him:

I had not been anxious to return to Villa Magdalena. I would have much preferred staying with my sister in Sulucan. I could have slept on the floor or stayed awake till dawn drinking tea and flirting with Manang.

(p. 86)

But Villa Magdalena and all its promise of fame and riches beckon to him. Like someone mesmerized he will return to it again and again until it becomes his possession. Later, when he has gotten what he has sought, he looks back to the past and his eyes are arrested by one figure—not his father, not his mother (who remains a vague indefinable shape), not Nene, his sister, but Mr. Gatbonton, his teacher, who was killed by the Japanese. When Alfredo learns of his teacher's death, he grieves a little:

But somehow I was glad that he died the way he did because I knew that he would have liked it that way, defending to the end what he could have called his responsibility. Never run away if you are right, he would tell us. In his own way, he taught us what courage meant. Somehow he seemed to say there was no running away, no escape. But we were young. He was too old for us. We did not understand his words.

(p. 14)

Whatever advice was given by the teacher has not had its impact on Alfredo. From the beginning, he has been running away from what is true and noble.

Mr. Gatbonton is the only character in the novel who seems to go against the grain so evident in all the other characters. He is what Alfredo could have been but chose not to be as he immerses himself in the destructive floods of life in the Villa.

THE IMAGE OF MAGDALENE AND SIN

A sense of death dominates Villa Magdalena. The very title calls to mind a thousand and one associations related to Mary Magdalene. Stock images—death, sin, beauty, repentance, perfume, doom—recur in the novel with almost monotonous regularity. Certainly, the story revolves around beautiful women, death, different odors that assail the characters at every turn, fatal attraction, and other images used symbolically to reinforce one dominant theme: the inexorable sense of doom and decay that overwhelms all the characters in the novel. In various ways, the novelist attempts to create patterns of interrelated images in embodying this central theme of decay.

Villa Magdalena as a symbol of death is reinforced by the description of the location of the Villa. It stands close to a street that leads to the foot of a hill where all the dead of Manila and the suburbs are buried. The vacant lot adjoining it is dumping ground for trash. In her delusions, Doña Magdalena addresses a nonexistent funeral procession:

God bless the darkness where you dwell but it is better there. Here is darkness, too, more hideous because it is thick with chandeliers. Goodbye, goodbye, you won't pass this way again, but there will be many who will follow, like my sister. Clasp my heart to her and tell her not to be lonely.

(p. 152)

In the house itself, several deaths occur among the members, Dr. Vidal, Elisa, Doña Asuncion, Doña Magdalena, and as the novel ends, there is also the impending death of Don Magno.

The characters themselves exhibit, in varying degree, various forms of sickness—physical, psychological and spiritual. For the inhabitants of the Villa, there is no merciful intervention so that one or two may be saved from a tragic ending. Fate seems to have decreed that the characters should not only suffer physical pain (and there are many of them who have this experience) but also moral disease that causes spiritual paralysis.

The sickness is discernible in Alfredo. His flaw consists in his inability to come to terms with himself. He could have done it if only he had willed it, by destroying the veil of illusion through which he has looked at the world. The moment he steps into the Villa, he turns his back on his own people—his roots—and all that they mean to him. The only reason he decides to visit them one Christmas eve is because of the anger he feels for the people in Villa Magdalena. But in Sulucan, he is regarded as a part of Villa Magdalena, so much so that a spoon must be laid on the table for him while the rest of the family eat with their hands. Even his affair with Manang is short-lived. He realizes that she comes from the world he desperately wants to escape. Her origins are as obvious as the smell of tobacco that clings to her. The only gift he gives her, as symbol of his love for her, is a bottle of perfume “Dona Emilia.” She sends him the empty bottle on his wedding day. By then, Manang with the pretty face and the seductive body, has become a very famous actress. In her own way, she has managed to flee.

Alfredo's desire to be accepted by the people of the Villa blinds him to the fact that he still owes his own family something. In the course of the novel, Alfredo is never depicted as showing concern for his family in Sulucan. He later muses:

I was still in high school when Father died. He died of consumption in a nipa house on a dry river bed in Sulucan. He had a grave somewhere at the foot of the hill on the outskirts of the city, beyond Villa Magdalena. There had once been a marker on it, an old piece of wood that soon rotted at the root and fell and lay buried under the grass. It was the same with mother's. I did not see her die. I don't even remember where she is buried. Only Nene and I were left and Nene still lived in Sulucan. She would live there all her life, raising a family of her own, wishing, I am sure, that I thought of her more often.

(pp. 18-19)

The vagueness with which he remembers everything related to his family is a clear indication that as far as the young Alfredo is concerned, he has severed his ties, not only with his family but with his past. This is just the first step toward self-delusion, and later self-destruction.

Seeing Alfredo reacting to various situations, the reader wonders if the man is really capable of such virtues as love, courage, and honesty. He leaves Manang because she does not belong to the world he wants to enter. He caters to every petty wish of Don Magno because this is the only way to advance in the old man's favor. The decision to get married comes from Nora. Alfredo is a helpless pawn and does not recognize his plight. Their marriage ends during the honeymoon, when Nora finds out that she is not pregnant. Alfredo touches her and it “was ice touching ice.”

It is interesting to note that during their honeymoon, he has a nightmare. The ship, S.S. Don Magno, runs into a storm. The hides of animals which the ship contains tumble down with a crash, pinning Alfredo. The smell of hides is all over him. Later on, he finds himself holding on to something which has the contours of the naked body of a woman. It is deeply tanned and looks like a mannequin, yet it seems so real.

Her eyes were open. There was no expression in them, neither fear nor compassion nor disgust. Another heave and a splintering crash above my head, and I was sinking down to the bottom of the ship, kicking away animal hides, tearing off skins sticking on my own flesh … Then the body was in my hands again, hard as ivory, but no sooner had I touched it than it softened in my hands and came up alive but dead.

(pp. 132-33)

In this dream, several basic images stand out—the odorous smell of the hides, the ship, the woman, the sea. The same images recur elsewhere in the novel. The description of the naked and lifeless body that seems real symbolizes Nora who at first looks real but turns out to be a woman of ice. Clearly, Nora is a death-symbol, an implacable foe who will forever haunt Alfredo.

There is no element of compulsion in the choice that Alfredo makes. He could have left the service of Don Magno early in life, while he was still the struggling high school student. But he did not. He will not risk anything now that everything is going on smoothly. He only has to close his eyes to his personal humiliation and shame.

One incident dramatizes the extent of Don Magno's grip on the young man. Alfredo finds a hundred pesos which Don Magno has inadvertently left in his room. His first impulse is to return the money to the old man. But after much deliberation, he decides to keep the money. He recalls the innumerable times when he discovered discrepancies in accounts, prevented double and over payments, collected stubborn debts, the sum total of which amounts to much more than 100 pesos. He remembers a hundred other occasions when he should have received a bonus for a work well done.

Any number of chits with varying amounts: a letter mailed on time, secret allowances deductible as something else like the different charities the newspapers talk about … and my silences, my hard faced silences and stony indifferences to a few things for which I would rather not have any name. Against any half of these, a hundred pesos was nothing.

(p. 89)

He has been so thoroughly initiated into his life that in the process he has lost the meaning of such words as “honesty” and “courage.”

His loyalty to Don Magno is put to a test when he visits Isabel and Sol in Tokyo, their permanent residence. He has been ordered to persuade Isabel to waive her rights to the land she owns in Pampanga which Don Magno is administering. Sol and Isabel have been his friends since he and Sol were two struggling young students. What Don Magno exacts from him is tantamount to a betrayal of friendship. He could have stopped the transaction, but does not and does not feel any qualms of conscience.

My first impulse was to give up the whole thing … But I stayed on, defending Don Magno, picturing him as he wished to be pictured—a generous old man, a benevolent lord. Remember how he used to throw coins to the poor in front of the balcony in Villa Magdalena every Christmas eve? Remember me? my slow inching upward from nothingness or next to nothingness to … this … whatever this means? Of course, as time passed, Don Magno's confidence in me felt like a load on my shoulders. The more he allowed me in his confidence, the stronger the ties that bound me to him became.

(p. 223)

No amount of self-justification can ever obliterate this flaw in his character.

He goes to the United States, desperately trying to widen the distance between him and Villa Magdalena. Now the Villa has become an obsessive symbol of the past and what he has been. But there is no way to escape. He returns as all those who attempt to escape have to return. Elisa's death, perhaps the only Conde worth saving, occasions the return of the living to mourn for the dead:

It all amounted to the same thing. There was no escaping what we were all afraid to talk about—the past, Villa Magdalena, the future, where, when and what shape it might take, a splendid name arching above a newly erected gate, another exile, never ending flight?

The last scene in the novel comes as a surprise. Coming in the wake of numerous events which demonstrate beyond the shadow of doubt his lack of moral courage, the ending does not seem to flow naturally from the course of events. The change in him is not fully motivated. There has been little indication that this man intends to sever his ties with the Villa—the source of power and prestige he has been aching to possess. The fact that he now bears the title Don merely strengthens the impression that the creation has become his creator. The novel has come full circle. It ends where it began.

IN THE IMAGE OF HIS MAKER

The creator, like his creation, is not perfect. Don Magno is as flawed as Alfredo. In a great many episodes, Don Magno occupies the center of the stage as he schemes and manipulates quite dexterously to amass more wealth and to prove to all that Villa Magdalena is really his. Compared to the old man, Alfredo is an indistinct shadow that cringes at every turn.

The name, Don Magno Medallada, evokes a sense of bemedalled greatness. Nothing is known of his past. The man himself seems to have conveniently forgotten what it was all about. What is known was that he was born poor, but because he was such a handsome-looking man, he swept Magdalena, the lovely heiress of the Condes, off her feet. Later on, he engaged in the leather industry, presumably using as capital the inheritance of his wife. Legends grew around him. It was even rumored that his mother was Balatong, one of the servants in Villa Magdalena.

The title Don pleases him immensely even as he enjoys striding in large plazas and halls and being the object of hushed awe, especially from people who know his power and wealth. He has a predilection for the theatrical and the spectacular. Annually a “shower of silver” is held as the culminating activity of the Christmas festivities. Perched imperiously on the balcony, Don Magno drops hundreds of silver coins to his employees on the ground who are all “expectant, catching the gleam of the balcony light, hungry eyes against dark taut faces, strained from the coming push and scramble, mouths set in anger, half open as in pain.” For Alfredo whose task it is to carry the container of silver coins, Don Magno appears “more like Pilate or Mussolini as he looked down the balcony, his greying hair, a silver sheen in the bright lights.”

Impressions of him (and there are many) are communicated by the other characters. Somehow, by deed or word, he demonstrates his power to touch their lives. Almost always, he is spoken of in vituperative terms—ruthless, greedy, selfish, a murderer. A man who considers himself the center of the universe, he demands absolute loyalty from those around him. He devises ways and means to get the lion's share of other people's inheritance. Among his victims was Dr. Vidal himself who owned huge tracts of land.

Doña Asuncion makes no bones of her contempt for him as a mere “upstart.” Isabel says, “I hate him, I hate him, Fred. I must tell you now.” Isabel distrusts him and does not try to hide her feelings. Alfredo himself, that paragon of obedience and self-abnegation, once spits at the bust of Don Magno.

Once during a particularly violent quarrel between Alfredo and Doña Asuncion, the bust falls from its pedestal. Alfredo picks it up and is amazed, for it seems whole. It takes Don Magno's trained eyesight to discover a barely perceptible crack. He orders Alfredo to have it repaired so that the illusion of perfection will be preserved. As Alfredo observes, the bust is that of a young man—Don Magno in youth, or a brother or a son. He is so close to it that he talks to it.

I arranged the mess on his table while he stood there, muttering under his breath. I could not hear what he was saying, he could be consoling the bust, confiding to it his latest secrets or cursing the old lady, praying for her death and asking the bust to help him out in his scheme. They were friends, the bust and he.

(p. 66)

Don Magno is a man who lives solely for the present. His lust for what life can offer seems insatiable. He becomes very uneasy at the sight of death. When Isabel insists that the body of Elisa should stay for one more day, Don Magno shouts at her: “Villa Magdalena is not a tomb! … Take the body away. Bury the dead!” It is surprising that the man who is himself a death-symbol (he has caused the death of people, symbolically) would hate the reality of death. As the novel ends, the odor of death envelops the whole house. It is a “smell, strange to these men and women because it was the smell of death” but quite familiar to Alfredo and possibly Don Magno who have both been exposed to the “foulness of putrid skins and the uncured hides of animals.”

This odor of death will cling to Don Magno like a stain, another symbol of the flaw in his character. To the end of his days, he will try to look for a cure for the foul odor of the leather in his factory, but he will fail. Throughout the novel, this symbolic detail will appear and reappear suggesting the incurable physical and moral disease of various characters. The source of the Medallada and Conde riches bears a terrible stench.

Another image associated with Don Magno is the ship, S.S. Don Magno, the vessel used to transport the raw hides from the south to Manila. The plan to build the ship comes from Alfredo. There is risk in this venture because it entails such large capital. Nevertheless, the idea is implemented, becomes successful. Don Magno receives the accolades. But the war comes and the ship is confiscated for the use of the Japanese Navy. Don Magno willingly surrenders his ship, pinning his hope on the day when the ship will be returned to him with the appropriate payment for services rendered. Nothing comes out of this optimism for the ship has sunk and no payment is given the old man.

The war years occur in the seventh chapter of the novel which is composed of thirteen chapters in all. Clearly, the war is meant to serve as a catalyst that will bring the last series of tragedies to the Villa. There have been deaths and scandals and betrayals enough before the war. But as war goes on, conditions in the Villa become worse. The family is forced to encounter poverty, indignities, humiliation, and shame. Don Magno, particularly, learns a bitter lesson from the war.

The frightening reality of this abstraction called war dawns upon him one evening as he is slapped and publicly humiliated by a group of drunken Japanese soldiers because he has refused to bow before them.

A crowd had gathered behind us, urging us to bend and bow. I saw the old man bowing, bowing low, slowly and humbly. I began to imitate him while tears stood in my eyes. There was a pulsating pain on my cheek. I wanted to touch it, but I kept bowing, with the old man, until we were dismissed and told to go.

(p. 160)

Don Magno, who did not believe that the Japanese were stupid enough to attack the Philippines, has to admit that this is really war. He says, “Now don't let anybody tell us that there's a war going on. Whatever others say, we know. No one need tell us.”

In this episode, the author's intrusion is quite evident. Santos, the novelist, speaks through Don Magno, his character, in a long passage concerning war. Coming from the lips of a ruthless and selfish man (such has been his pattern of behavior), the words exhibit some artificiality. The words seem out of character, especially when one considers the poignancy evoked by the noble and lofty ideas articulated.

“In later years,” Don Magno continued, his voice showing none of the strain … “men will talk of forgiveness and letting bygones be bygones. They will be right. There is no place for grudges in the mind or in the heart. Unless … well … but who will determine what one is to remember, what to forget? It will not be very hard to forget the death of a loved one. Death is but one of the many lessons all of us have to take. What will be hard to forget is the way death came about, the indignity to the body, the wound, the shame, the long travail.”

(p. 161)

During the war years, Don Magno seems to have softened. Suffering appears to have taken its toll on the proud and egotistical man. He emerges in a new light. He even shows pity for his wife who has taken over the role of her dead sister.

But after the war, there is a return to the original pose. He is seen pathetically holding on to millions of worthless pesos in Japanese money which he has hidden away. Later, he is stricken with paralysis but he still insists on running his business. His physical paralysis merely concretizes the moral paralysis that has hardened his soul. In the last episode in the novel, the wake for Elisa, he curses the dead and the bells that keep tolling. His face even assumes a dark and demoniac look. He does not die in the novel, but his inevitable death—both body and soul wracked by so much pain and anguish—is foreshadowed:

At the sound of my voice, he opened his eyes and stared at me and in the stillness, his paralyzed arm, beating on the edge of the bed, sounded like a wall clock ticking off time. Slowly, as if the movement was all pain, he turned away and something like a death rattle rumbled in his throat. The air filled with the smell of rotting animal hide, nauseating.

(p. 275)

Neither love, nor compassion, nor warmth has been experienced by the poor boy from Pampanga who deluded himself into thinking that the climb to the top is possible without compromise and guilt.

THE DOOMED WOMEN

The women of Villa Magdalena are not spared. Each of them suffers from some malady. Like Don Magno, her sworn enemy, Doña Asuncion suffers from a physical deformity—elephantiasis—which has tied her to a wheelchair. She is a proud woman, the only character who does not cower in the presence of Don Magno. She is no sniveling, whimpering woman like her sister or even like Alfredo. When it comes to her family's name and honor, she is fiercely protective. Physically disabled, she still manages to run Villa Magdalena. Thus she will not give up Elisa to Dr. Vidal's sister nor will she allow Don Magno to curse her own niece Isabel. It is significant that she is responsible for the crack in the treasured bust of Don Magno. Among all the characters, she is probably the only one who can see through his veneer of sophistication and wordliness. He is still the peasant from Pampanga, despite his marriage to her sister.

Her sickness, the enlargement of her limbs, is a detail in the overall pattern of disease in this universe. In a sense, the fact that she has remained unmarried reflects the idea of impending death. There is nobody to inherit the Villa, since Doña Magdalena is childless. With the death of Doña Asuncion during the war, the Conde family dies out.

Asuncion returns, however, for her role is literally resumed by her deranged sister. It is during these agonizing moments when she spouts Cassandra-like predictions that Doña Magdalena gains dimension as a character. In her lucid moments, she appears as an ineffectual character, the embodiment of meekness and patience whose only outlet for her sorrows seems to be her tears. In her new role, she crystallizes her thoughts about the different members of the household. Like a spectre, she haunts everybody, constantly reminding the person concerned of the truth about himself. In her long litanies of apparently senseless meandering, she succeeds in defining the identity of each individual in the Villa.

Alfredo, she calls “an echo,” something that does not have its own existence. She warns him not to become a living bust, obviously alluding to Don Magno's piece of sculpture. She mourns the death of Dr. Vidal because there was still so much to live for. She prophesies that Elisa, because she bears the sign of the Condes will be like her mother “who thought there would be a better kind of life in exile and found only death even while she thinks she lives.” Of Nora, she speaks with softness and compassion:

Here is another Conde … lithe and doomed like the sparrow, with a constant fever only death can quench. Every day, a part of you walks in the shadows of the hills to join the feasting, but you will never be quenched or filled. There will be great moaning behind you, but no love, except in the hearts of those who were born fools.

(p. 153)

The plight of Doña Magdalena is the plight of the Villa—both started out lovelier than all else only to see themselves ravaged by time and death. Alfredo sees in her a graphic illustration of what is happening to the rest of the Villa.

For those of us who could stand to look and bear what the sight did to our hearts, the mental collapse of a once beautiful and dignified woman, gradual but complete, was not just one of those things. It not only touched us, it was happening to us, too.

(p. 149)

Flight is the common denominator among Isabel, Nora and Elisa. Afraid of the consequences of their act, these women try to escape from their guilt-ridden past, embodied in Villa Magdalena. Isabel and Elisa inevitably return, the mourner and the mourned. And Nora is presumed to return in the future to reap what she has sown. Destined to marry the wrong men (Dr. Vidal in the case of Isabel and Alfredo in the case of Nora) they fall in love with other men. In one compulsive act, they court society's censure. The only solution is, therefore, flight to another country.

Isabel leaves husband and daughter for the sake of Sol. For many years, she has longed to touch and caress Elisa but every effort she makes in trying to establish contact with her daughter is thwarted. The only ties she establishes with her daughter are the pictures of Elisa sent to her. What she possesses is only the image of her daughter. This separation from her daughter is compounded by their being exiles in a foreign land. In order to assuage her loneliness and homesickness, she buys a piano in a junk shop. For a month, Isabel and Sol try to repair it, with “the pieces scattered around on the rug on the floor.” They are like shattered pieces of a dream that impelled them in the first place to flee their former life. Finally, they are able to repair it and Isabel has to rummage in shops trying to find Philippine music pieces. All this time one image continually haunts her.

It was Elisa, Elisa all the time … They were in such a hurry for fear that their elopement would be discovered that he had discouraged her when Isabel thought, at the last hour, of taking Elisa along.

(p. 227)

When Isabel asks Alfredo to select a picture which bears the closest resemblance to Elisa, he observes that all the pictures look like the real Elisa. But Elisa as she really is, is not known to anybody, not even to Alfredo, her lover. Isabel fiercely holds on the illusion that these pictures reveal everything about her daughter. It gives her real delight to think of her as a carefree, happy young girl who bears no grudge against the world. For Isabel, illusion and reality have become indistinct. Once she says, “My daughter's living, thank God. Nothing has happened to her.” But, as Alfredo observes, there is no conviction in her tone. He looks at the pictures and thinks:

… everything about her face that said, this is beauty and joyous, but somehow sad like the sadness of saints and dark like the secret burden of the sinning and the halt. The face, speaking through the eyes, said all sorts of things. Happiness, it said, give me happiness. What is true, it asked, what is real? Take pity, it said, take pity.

(p. 234)

As Alfredo leaves them, he smiles at “all the fools in the world, the sweet and bitter fools.”

Like her cousin Isabel, Nora takes to flight to escape whatever is haunting her. Her elopement with Nick is the culmination of her growing indifference toward Alfredo. Alfredo becomes the recipient of a presidential award. Nora is with him but she is so distant and so aloof, she might as well not be there. In the midst of the gaiety, the sadness lingers, “the shadow, come up at last, after all these years, from some unhallowed tomb.”

Nora is described through a maze of allusions to tombs and also to cemeteries. Alfredo first kissed her as they passed the cemetery near the Villa. Later, whenever they pass by the cemetery, she sits “at the far end of the back seat as though allowing for space between us for the ghosts of the thousand dead, unremembered times.” This conscious gesture is perhaps a reflection of the desire of the woman to lengthen the distance between them. A child could have bridged the gap but Nora refuses to have one. An object constantly associated with Nora is a beautiful flower which, when crushed, gives off a terrible odor. These flowers grow in her garden and are called bignolia. They are quite lovely “until you touch them.”

For the lovers, Alfredo has planned a grotesque punishment commensurate with the gravity of their deed. He will imprison them at the back of the tanning factory where all the refuse from the stinking hides and skins is piled up under a mountain of lime. They will be locked up, chained together, naked, back to back. Cockroaches and maggots shall feed on their flesh. Once again, the image of the hides—and all its attendant associations—is used to objectify the nature of Nora's flaw.

Of all the Condes, Elisa is the only one who could have escaped misery. Unknown to Nora, Elisa is the mistress of her husband. The irony of it all is that Nora persists in her belief that only Elisa has preserved her honor, among the Conde women. Like the other Condes, Elisa tries to escape the Villa and succeeds for a short time. In a letter to Alfredo she says:

Leave the Villa to the old and the dying. It has had its day. Have you not noticed how the shadows of the cathedral reach out and darken? Has it not always stood in the shadows?

(p. 240)

Elisa is young and full of promise. The Villa is for the old hugging their memories. Thus she feels the real need to leave the place. And leaving it, she dies.

Alfredo, after Elisa's death, remembers only her sadness. Others will remember her beauty and gentleness. But only Alfredo knows the extent of her bitterness. Throughout her young life, she seems to be hounded by devils. There is only lust for death until she falls in love with Alfredo. Now there is reason for living. Her death only serves to heighten the sense of doom and chaos that engulfs the whole novel.

Isabel and Nora are both guilty of sin and thus their consequent anguish and loneliness seem justified. But how does one explain the highly contrived fate that befalls Elisa, the youngest and the least sinful of the Conde women? One answer is that the sin of the first exile, Isabel, is avenged by the death of her child whom she sees again, after so many years as a corpse. Elisa's death which occurs in the last chapter, is a convenient and a sentimental way, to force the roving Condes and Medalladas to return from their ill-fated flight to the dying ancestral home. The cycle of flight and return is now completed. The instrument of their return is a woman who from the beginning of her life has been surrounded by death-forces.

The novel, which opens as Alfredo Medallada prepares for flight finally ends, its denouement precipitated by interrelated events that now crowd the protagonist's memory. The lessons to be culled from them are far from pleasant, as Alfredo finally realizes. His education has reached a full circle.

CONCLUSION

Villa Magdalena is far from being a perfect work of art. Like the story it unfolds (the material), the manner of rendering experience (the fictional technique) seems also flawed. Some of the characters do not strike the reader as believable in the context of the novel. For example, Alfredo and Don Magno are not provided sufficient motives that will explain or justify the logic of their actions in the story. Santos as a storyteller seems to be more at home with his minor characters like Maestro Buan and Tacing. His brief impressionistic strokes succeed in creating delightfully believable characters who after serving their purpose withdraw from the scene.

Another factor that contributes to this sense of imperfection is the injudicious use of symbols to reinforce the meaning of the story. Santos evidently succeeds in making the minor characters alive because they are allowed to act out their roles without burdening them with too many symbolic equivalents. The major characters, on the other hand, seem to suffer from the weight of too many self-consciously constructed patterns of symbols and images. The various symbols like the odor of the hides, the bust, the silver coins, and all the other symbols of disintegration and death, suffer from being too obvious. Symbols are more effective if they are superimposed on the story, if they are utilized to suggest, rather than to make explicit statements. At times, the novelist gives the impression that his use of this technique is so obviously crafted that it intrudes into the smooth flow of the story.

This brief discussion of technique, however, should not blind the perceptive reader to the overall significance of the novel, not only as a literary artifact but as a reflector of certain aspects of Philippine society. Bienvenido N. Santos has undertaken a study of segments of contemporary society, subjecting them to a withering critical appraisal. The novel's significance derives from this conscious scrutiny of the complex forces that have shaped modern life, even as it recreates in its fictional world the actual clash and never-ending opposition and tension that characterize actual reality.

Villa Magdalena, despite its limitations, still stands out as one of the more significant novels to come out of the 1960s. Together with the major novels of the time, Santos's work has attempted to deepen the Filipino's insight into his own life.

Notes

  1. Bienvenido N. Santos, Villa Magdalena (Manila: Erewhon, 1965). All references are to this edition.

  2. Bienvenido N. Santos, You Lovely People (Manila: Benipayo Press, 1955); The Day Dancers Came: Selected Prose Works (Manila: Bookmark, 1967).

  3. N. V. M. Gonzalez, Bamboo Dancers (Manila: Benipayo Press, 1963); F. Sionil Jose, The Pretenders (Manila: Alberto S. Florentino Publishing, 1962).

  4. Kerima Polotan, The Hand of the Enemy (Manila: Regal Publishing for the Philippine Center of International PEN, 1962); N. V. M. Gonzalez, A Season of Grace (Manila: Benipayo Press, 1963).

A lecture delivered as part of the English Department Lecture Series. Ateneo de Manila University, August 1975.

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The Midwestern Fiction of Bienvenido N. Santos