It would be such a pity if Cesar Ruiz Aquino’s thick anti-novel, Zero for short— a comprehensive summary of his prose of robust eloquence spanning more than six decades — cannot be reprinted after it quickly sold out in a small print run by a Cebu publisher in 2021. The epic work, at well over 100,000 words, faces difficult odds for a second edition.
Currently, the only way to attract a publisher’s interest with a review or preview is to highlight enduring passages from any time period.
“Just as every child longs to own the toys they see in the windows of bazaars, or dreams of being able to fly; just as every young man has the feeling at the moment of falling in love that he has somehow already succumbed to the girl – reading great advertising copy has always filled me with longing.
“Great blurbs, yes, like in A treasure trove of great blurbs. Or: Immortal Blurbs, an anthology. I should blush to the roots of my hair to think that I once shamelessly wrote fantasy blurbs for my yet-to-be-written novel, which was entirely dreamed and nonexistent (the year was 1988) – but, shame on me shameless one, I don’t, and am actually doing it again here. The above opening sentence, which violates the comma-splicing rule, is a blurb for this book, written by the author and maneuvered into the main body of the work itself to ensure that no edition of the work would be without it.
“…Yes, here are stories of a day, poems through the night. A haunting work of imagination, yes, meaning in the sense that the book is only imagined, ha-ha! still unwritten, imaginary, dreamed. I dreamed that your arms were beautiful, as the song says. Usually it is the subject of a book that is imaginary, if it is a novel, but in this case it is the book itself, which does not exist, at least as I write this. And it haunts me, this elusive remove of a title, for that is what the whole obsession has amounted to so far – a title among other titles that have proliferated: Suspicious Chronicles … A House on an Unreal Street … Children of Abat: Cebuano Gothic … Once Upon a Time in Dumas Goethe … Return to Zenda … Last Exit to the Land of the Yukyuknapatawa … Mr. Mxyzptlk Enters the Equation … An Orificer and a Genital Man … Like a Shadow That Only Fits a Figure It Is Not a Shadow … Ouroboros in Borobudur … There Is No Moon on the Moon … Lure Me with Laurel … Laurels, Lorelei …”
Aquino is a wordsmith, punner, voracious reader, scholar and philosopher of games. In addition to love poems, he writes memoirs, novels, existential commentaries, theses and metapocrypha. A source of literary allusions and delusions, he suddenly takes a swipe at the Alain Delons of this world who steal our muses – all girls are as mythical as music.
“I cannot write a novel, so I have come to the conclusion that it will be an autobiography, albeit a failed non-fiction writer. Failed autobiographer. In any case, I will be the book. Or rather, the book will aspire to be me. But of course, you will say, what book is not the author? I mean, some reader, perhaps a French woman traveling in the Philippines who knows English, will read it in bed on a winter night, fall asleep with the book in her hand and wake up startled to find a man lying next to her talking in his sleep, dreaming with a word. Paris! Friends will recognize the casual posture, the sleepwalking gait, the steps. The strange inconsistency in the language, which is alternately articulate and groping (sometimes overflowing, sometimes falling silent). The strange contradiction in the eyes: sometimes directed towards the face of his interlocutor out of natural inclination, sometimes turned away from it out of habit. The palms of the hands. That really shake up the young girl from Paris, even though he only caresses her in her dreams. In his dream.
“…In the calculation of the daydream, the work is done. I cut my fingernails – or eat them – the book has been published in both hardback and paperback and lo and behold! The onion-shaped blurbs and the publication and the party and lo and behold! The author is there and is not there.
“…Zamboanga is the word of my life. Few other words or names possess for me what the French Symbolists call the evocative power of words, the magical ability of words to make something absent present.
“I think I recognised this symbolistic notion of words as a boy. Certain words had an almost physical effect on me. ‘Eat his words’ would not have been a figure of speech to me if I had heard it. And I actually invented some words, although ‘invented’ is perhaps not the exact word, as these words simply popped into my childish mind. And they were words which meant nothing, as they were not intended to mean anything. I kept repeating these words to myself, like an idiot, and they had a very strange effect on me indeed. They were the strangest of a child’s toys.
“It’s World War II – everyone is restless in town because of the Japanese. We’re swimming in the sea at the dock and Siquijor is mysteriously just a few strokes away. So we’re literally floating even before I kiss you and Santa Claus comes to visit us. In the dream, he’s a little boy. Does that mean it takes a world war for me to do it? Does that mean I should have done it in 1961? But you were only eleven; besides, I hadn’t come to Dumaguete yet. In the other dream, the other kiss, I kiss you among the windfall and lotus flowers and you laugh and say, ‘Why not?'”
These fragments are part of the first chapter. The author goes to Dumaguete’s Silliman, UP Diliman, UP Baguio, joins Child terror among the literary world, wins prizes, works with a media agency, teaches, mentors, ponders muses, reads, reads, reads and writes sporadically and then a lot.
Where is it all going? Vadis, whom we quote, evaporates and disappears in a vanity of bon mots that become bonfires. He is plump throughout. He can do nothing about it, even about glossolalia. He is a magician and a sage. Another publisher should secure more copies of an eventual classic. Why should it become one? Because only Aquino can transmit memories of writers from 1962, from Leonard and Linda Ty Casper, Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, Franz Arcellana, Nick Joaquin and so on, as well as of films and film stars all the way back to Rosa del Rosario in her Darna or Jaime de la Rosa in Enchantedearly writers from Pagadian and the Visayas as part of the moving matrix, older chess masters whom he defeated as a young magician, such as Florencio Campomanes.
Over 60 years of entertainment that also mixes prose with poetry and makes detours into sudden fiction or strangely didactic poetry. The transformations can be as beguiling as twists that become chain stories disguised as Möbius strips.
Further generations should not be neglected Z for short.
