La Tercera - Softcover

Apostol, Gina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1641295724 ISBN 13: 9781641295727

Verlag: Soho Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

In her first novel since Insurrecto, Gina Apostol assembles a vision of Philippine history from the 19th century to present day in the fragmented story of the Delgados, a family surviving across generations of colonization, catastrophe, and war.

Rosario, a Filipina novelist in New York City, has just learned of her mother’s death in the Philippines. Instead of rushing home, she puts off her return by embarking on a remote investigation into her family’s history and her mother’s supposed inheritance, a place called La Tercera, which may or may not exist. Rosario catalogs generations of Delgado family bequests and detritus: maps of uncertain purpose, rusted chicken coops, a secret journal, the words to songs sung at the family home during visits from Imelda Marcos.

Each life Rosario explores opens onto an array of other lives and raises a multitude of new questions. But as the search for La Tercera becomes increasingly labyrinthine, Rosario’s mother and the entire Delgado family emerge in all their dizzying complexity: traitors and heroes, reactionaries and revolutionaries. Meanwhile, another narrative takes shape—of the country’s erased history of exploitation and slaughter at the hands of American occupying forces.

La Tercera is Gina Apostol’s most ambitious, personal, and encompassing novel: a story about what seems impossible—capturing the truth of the past—and the terrible cost to a family, or a country, that fails to try.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gina Apostol is the author of the novels Insurrecto, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Bibliolepsy, and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. She is the winner of two Philippine National Book Awards, the PEN/Open Award, and the Rome Prize. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines.

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Effects

Of the visible works left behind by Francisco “Paco” Delgado y Blumfeld and Jorge “Jote” Delgado y Blumfeld, what persists does not console. The long-dead brothers possessed the following effects:
     1. a weird-looking guitar;
     2. the rusted remains of chicken coops along the river Himanglos in Salogó;
     3. a seawall, a.k.a. AWOL;
     4. a digest of operatic libretti (in which a parasite has erased an etching of Lucia di Lammermoor and the ghost shape of a moth enshrouds the buried bride);
     5. the name of a dog, Moret;
     6. three volumes bound in leather, with a title in gold lettering, William McKinley’s World, resting in a domed sepulcher;
     7. a wooden box, 9 x 18 x 3, inlaid with capiz, and on its lid the initials F.B.;
     8. the journals of a boy already at war but not yet in his teens, 1899-1901;
     9. maps of the area called San Jose in Tacloban and of a gleam of land, now called Greenhills, in metropolitan Manila.
 
They were hidden in plain view around the Delgado family home, a forsaken place in the wilds of Leyte, and the question of which brother owned what was moot. We called them both Lolo—their identities interchangeable because it seemed they had none: their world was incomprehensible.
     For a long time, I mixed the brothers up.
     No one in the house touched their effects except the worms.
     The Delgados are a fretful clan, prone to delusions of pathos rather than grandeur. We linger on the abstract, such as despair and pride. I speak of the Delgados I know—my mother’s family—madmen and collaborators, so I’m told. By the time I had come across my mother’s inheritance, the banality of objects in the material world inhabited by her grandfathers had lost, for my mother, even the sense of the ridiculous—she had ceased to see them.
     Instead, the memory of La Tercera, a place she had never known, drove her mad.
     I grew up under the shadow of La Tercera. It was a legacy not quite tangible but not improbable. And this ambiguity has led members of my family, through generations, to acts that have ended in a sense of loss that burdens too many in the place I am from.
 
 
Top of the World

The voicemail was from my uncle, Tio Nemorino, the honorable mayor as they called him years after his regime.
     I’d been calling my mother the entire month. She had no use for Messenger. Skype was dead to her. She owned no computers. She was the last woman in that selfie-happy archipelago to have only a rotary phone.
     All I had was her voice.
     During the years I’ve lived in New York, I admit I never called her much. I hate the phone. I mislay it, I pretend I’m not home, I hate the need to call people. The rest of the family knows. They know they will expect no birthday greetings, they will hear nothing from me when my books come out, they will learn about my readings on Facebook, where all the Filipinos are. I’m on Facebook for my books. I have a phone for my mom.
     Her voice was girlish, high-pitched, the voice of one, I thought, who believed too easily in illusion. My mom lived in the future, and the present was a dislocation. She had the trick of making you think it was your existence that gave her joy—partly because of her childish voice, her intakes of breath as she spoke to you, as if her diaphragm and lungs were not formed enough for her thrill.
     “Inday!” she said when it was first detected, “I’m so healthy. I just had my tests!”
     She always called me inday, sounding like she had so many children she had forgotten my name, though I’m her only daughter.
     “But Mom, Tio Nemor said—”
     “My heart is good, my cholesterol is great, my lungs are perrrrfect! All I have is cancer! Without cancer I’m on top of the world!”
     And she began to hum that song from my childhood.
     I could see her doing the cha-cha with the cord of the rotary phone, shaking her hips, dressed in satin and silk, lithe and unconquerable in her feline way, like the stray cats that perched on the unfinished cement wall in Mana Marga’s dirty-kitchen, purring in the security of having so many lives.
     When she was first told she should have surgery to take out her cancerous breast, she refused.
     “How can you dance the tango if you have only one breast!”
     I imagined her, Adina an guapa, pearled and perfumed, dancing the cha-cha to Karen Carpenter, in her high heels. I keep seeing her in her seventies bouffant—though in her last pictures, uploaded on Facebook by Putt-putt who never tags me but still I follow him, her hair has thinned. Her reflexive mode of existence was to go ballroom dancing. She wore high heels to water her orchids in the garden, and when I was a kid watching her use a brown eyebrow pencil to line her lips, she laughed as I stared—“Inday!” she said, humming as she did the weirdest things to her face, her deft fingers etching herself into shape—“does it look good, inday?” she asked.
     “Yes,” I’d say, and it was true.
     I grew up with the daring invention of my mom’s daily routines.
     My mom wore her beauty in a way that was not a drag to others: we were just proud witnesses. Nothing marred her grace. People in Tacloban called her Adina an guapa, that was her nickname. Adina the beautiful. She emerged from her rituals looking somehow like Gina Lollobrigida, who was famous in Tacloban because she once posed by our fantastical bridge.
     Adina an guapa was a silk-and-organza spectacle from the time of that first dictator, the locus of my memory of my mom.
     “Top of the World” was her brother Nemorino’s campaign song, the one the band struck when Tio Nemorino ran for mayor in the seventies.
     “You know that’s not a good allusion, Mom,” I said. “Karen Carpenter did not come to a good end.”
     She told me not to return home.
     She told me what mattered was that I was an artist—how could I leave New York, she said, when I had my career, I was a hysterical novelist, as she called with pride my vocation, my work on events so forgotten neither victors nor losers give a damn.
     “It’s your dream, inday. You stay where you are. In Green Witch. To do your art.”
     “Greenwich Village, Mom.”
     “It says here on the postcard. Green Witch. Stay in Green Witch.”
     So I did.
     My mother’s gift to me was that she believed in all of my dreams, including the stupid ones.
     She kept up a perfect face no matter how ordinary or significant the moment, so that neither her illness nor her love sent me home.
     It was Tio...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Soho Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1641295724
• ISBN 13: 9781641295727
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 480
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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