miyako73
07-22-2010, 10:34 AM
I've been learning how to write a biographical fiction (short story) without making it look like an essay. I hope you guys can tell me if this piece has a feel of a story. Thanks.
The Performer of Silence
When we first met in his class, I knew then that it would not be easy to forget someone like him, a distingue artiste, my Drama professor, my very dramatic friend.
I had never imagined before, when I was his student, that one day I would be writing about him. Why he had never been open about himself and his life (or his death since living to him was dying) had always been a puzzle. I had had no idea who and where his families, friends, and lovers were; what they were made of: fantasy or reality; and how he had failed, suffered, endured with them. I had tried writing a story about him, a biographical short story, believing that he could be both the antagonist and the protagonist of himself. It ended up looking like a long, stuffy essay about a man with a great mind. I failed.
“How does one write a story about someone’s mind?” I found myself wondering. ”Is it his mind I’m writing or mine?” The more I pondered, the more befuddled I became.
His life, for years, had rolled, span, and twisted around drama, but I could not make the story about him dramatic. Partly, I blamed his vainglorious humility that was not really humble. He would rather want to be seen and proven than heard but doubted. “How I do my works, translate my ideas and how I express my opinions, shout my dissenting reactions speak for themselves,” he would say with disguised pride and subtle “take it or leave it” effrontery.
He had not confessed to me anything personal about himself. It could be an issue of trust or his unexampled definition of friendship. He was like a host who let me in his house and showed his office and library but not his living and dining rooms. There was no way for me to know how he cooked his meal, ate his favorite dish, watched the television, rested on the sofa, and lived. I could understand if his bedroom and the adjacent bathroom were off limits. Early on, when he said, “You’re my friend, but I don’t feel the need to tell you what you don’t need to know,” I got his unarticulated message: “Don’t be nosy on me.”
A talented theater artist and prolific playwright, he had never talked about his success, nor had he enumerated his numerous awards or the rewards he got from them. I found out about his Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Onassis International Prize through Wikipedia that scantly mentioned his humble beginnings and personal backgrounds. That he got those awards did not really interest me. I expected him to get a lot of those; he deserved them. Who he met in Paris or slept with in Athens, to me, was more interesting, but he would not tell me.
I could have written how he leaned onto someone while walking under the glare of the streetlights along the tree-lined sidewalk of the Champs-Élysées as Edith Piaf’s vibrato soared on his ipod. He used to play “La vie en rose” for me. I could have described how someone held his hand to pull him up as he climbed the rocky hill of Areopagus just below the Acropolis under the vivid intensity of the Mediterranean sun. He told me about the burbling water in a fountain at Panepistimiou.
I could write about the places he went and the songs he listened, but not those who had passionately cared for him or those who had taken advantage of his gullible affection. I knew he had lovers; I saw their photos he used as bookmarks.
Nonetheless, what I had heard from him, seen in him, known about him were more than enough for a long but incomplete eulogy, if I had to write my memories about someone, someone still breathing, still roaming around, still looking for something he would never find. He was a very complicated man.
Proud to have known him—a man of many contradictions—I had always shared what I knew about his mind: his thoughts, reasons, inconsistencies, and absurdities. Not an easy task, where to start had bogged me down, even then. Every angle of him looked strangely different. He was as rare as his wood-rimmed eyeglasses and as flagrant as his green toy-looking wristwatch.
Nobody had really succeeded in boxing him in and restraining and suffocating him with a label. He was his own kind. Even his failings and inadequacies appeared to be uniquely his own. “Copycats are beasts,” he said when asked how he felt being widely plagiarized and mimicked by those writers and artists who had tried to appear erratic and look weird like him.
I had seen him several times display his eccentric sense of fashion. He would show up in a bamboo-printed kimono or walk around in a long pleated sarong. He would match it with a pair of sockless Gucci or Prada shoes, which he bought not for the trendy name but for its quaint design and discounted price. He set his own trend.
It was on a Monday a decade ago when the fall semester of that year just opened and the University welcomed back its long-missed prodigal son, my brilliant professor. He had spent years abroad because of the former chairman of his department who did not like him and his radical ideas about theater. He would rather exile himself than compromise to the vagaries of the bores.
Obstinate purists, his enemies in the academe tagged him as anti-theater, anti-literature, anti-everything. Philippine drama would have evolved sooner, had he stayed and slugged it out against his corybantic antagonists in the velvet-curtained proscenium.
Late for some minutes, he arrived bringing nothing with him. No books. No records. Not even a chalk or a pen. He got my attention. My curiosities—who he was, where he was from, why he was that way— began. My classmates teased me about my being a university groupie, an intellectual’s stalker they said.
I would have done the same thing if he were Tennessee Williams or Elia Kazan. I observed great minds, for a hobby. I watched fascinating people. In bars, clubs, malls or cafes, I looked for them. I should have been a psychologist; even the crazy and the solitary ones amused me.
Everything about our professor was a study—his long browned hair; his bluish pouted lips, his flexible gestures; his French-tipped fingernails; even his gastrointestinal-sounding name. We called him‘Sir Prot’. His real name was Protacio.
No microphone, his perfectly modulated voice echoed inside the soundproofed acting studio. Its pitch, on his whim, could change from baritone to falsetto. His eyes, sharp and wide as if in a hypnotic trance, intimidated us like we were in front of a star, a melodramatic star, or a queen, a hysterical queen. He, however, was neither vicious nor pompous. He just loved to exhibit his arrogant confidence expressed in his inimitable antics and orotund verbiage.
A rarity among published scholars in the university, he loathed people who used long-winding sentences to assert their never-ending circular arguments. He was fine with meaningful fragments. “Less chatter, less blooper.” He utilized drama to save a few words. Dexterously animated, his gestures evinced his intents. What his eyes could express did not need a verbal follow-up. Silence, to him, was part of speech.
Sir Prot shocked the readers of the literary magazine that published “The Emperor’s New Soliloquy,” the thoughtless work he did to enliven the stodgy atmosphere at the University. It launched a contentious debate on what prose and poetry should look like and should be. His prose was, well, blank after the title. He responded with another poem, “The Woeful One,” with a sad smiley. The rigid, intolerant noise still droning, he provoked them further with another one, “Trudging in the Chalcedony Universe of Onyx Roads and Alabaster Cliffs,” in which he filled the entire page with connected lines using his laptop’s underscore key. He had been collecting quarts and stones for his bedroom walls that time. The university debate fizzled after that “geopoetry,” a literary page as a landscape according to him. He won. He had fun.
Once, I dropped by his academic office to consult about the work of the dramatist Kara Joro and the use of masks in Japanese theater. “Sir, I’ve read ‘The Virgin’s Mask’.”
It felt awkward to start a conversation with him; I was not sure if I would sound curious or dumb or both. “Is there such a thing, a real mask worn by a virgin?”
His forehead crumpled as if he pondered upon my question with difficulty, but his eyes did not seem superciliously dismissive. No smirk. No frown. He listened.
“How do they make a mask for a virgin in Japan?” I made myself clearer this time, hoping I made sense with my question.
“What’s a virgin or virginity in Japanese culture?” I carefully composed my sentence.
“Is the mask pure white, expressionless, primitive?” I continued with cautious inflections, mildly stuttering; he had made it known early on that he had no time for wasteful nonsense—bull****ting included.
“Is a virgin totally untouched?” I expounded, expecting he would perceive the earnest intention of my inquiries.
He remained silent on all questions, as peaceful as his bare faculty room he had rarely used. I saw no clutter on the study table. The shelf, standing idly, held no books, which he did not really need as he taught his class mostly straight from memory. The mess, the dirt I saw indicated his prolonged absence and the passing of time. Dusts and cobwebs moved and shifted. The breeze, filtered by the rusty screen behind the half pulled window shutter, disturbed them.
An academic nomad, he had led a lifestyle without enough time and permanent space to settle. A wayfaring life of a gypsy appealed to him. He had been in the university for almost twenty years, but he had spent most of the time on foreign travels and university visits. The year before he decided to come home, he was a visiting professor at a Mongolian university, where he studied the horse fiddle called Morin Khuur. He went all over to teach and learn, finding and creating something new and unheard of in the process. Before Ulan Bator, he was a French Government scholar in Paris translating the works of the twentieth-century European playwrights into Tagalog, the literary language of the Filipinos. He also received a grant from a Chinese organization to study Peking Opera in Beijing. His Chinese seemed fluent; the noodle guy near his house understood him. Sir Prot traveled everywhere searching for drama.
Persistent, I did not stop, thinking he was just being pensive and miserly since it was after lunch, the usual time for afternoon siesta. I badly needed some references for my paper. “Is innocence enough a mask for a virgin?” I said with a feeling that I was doing a monologue. More questions from me and no answer from him.
At forty, Sir Prot’s face still exuded the adventurous mien of youth. His skin still glowed. He could pass as a mestizo—half Spanish and half something. Suffused with shades of pink looking like rashes, his cheeks flushed when hit by sunlight. No embarrassment could turn him red. He did not mind when I gawked at his chin dotted with a huge ripe pimple, which completed the imaginary question mark on his face that arched from his creased forehead and curved down to his fastened lips. It looked like I did not make sense to him, after all.
“Okay, Sir, I’ll just come back some other day.” I gave up, forcing myself to think that maybe he was not in the mood to talk. To me, the cold shoulder I got from him meant I had to change course and go back to the easier one, Chekhov. Artists could be selfish with their ideas too, the only rationale I could assume. I had no choice but to turn my back and leave worsted.
Before I could hold onto the knob and open the door, he spoke like a Zen monk who just broke his meditation. “Sorry, I just had a yellow-curried chicken; I haven’t brushed yet.” I could not control my laugh.
Like a sage with his calm and precise words, he began, “Everyone is a virgin, and everyone has a mask of innocence.”
I quickly turned my back and walked towards the chair by his study table. I cleared the dust that must have settled on the furniture a long time ago, pulled the incomplete cobweb on its backrest, and sat as if I was offered. Although gaps and pauses vacillated his responses, we talked just about anything that afternoon but ourselves. My patience worked. That day, we became friends and I learned how deep and penetrating silence could be.
The Performer of Silence
When we first met in his class, I knew then that it would not be easy to forget someone like him, a distingue artiste, my Drama professor, my very dramatic friend.
I had never imagined before, when I was his student, that one day I would be writing about him. Why he had never been open about himself and his life (or his death since living to him was dying) had always been a puzzle. I had had no idea who and where his families, friends, and lovers were; what they were made of: fantasy or reality; and how he had failed, suffered, endured with them. I had tried writing a story about him, a biographical short story, believing that he could be both the antagonist and the protagonist of himself. It ended up looking like a long, stuffy essay about a man with a great mind. I failed.
“How does one write a story about someone’s mind?” I found myself wondering. ”Is it his mind I’m writing or mine?” The more I pondered, the more befuddled I became.
His life, for years, had rolled, span, and twisted around drama, but I could not make the story about him dramatic. Partly, I blamed his vainglorious humility that was not really humble. He would rather want to be seen and proven than heard but doubted. “How I do my works, translate my ideas and how I express my opinions, shout my dissenting reactions speak for themselves,” he would say with disguised pride and subtle “take it or leave it” effrontery.
He had not confessed to me anything personal about himself. It could be an issue of trust or his unexampled definition of friendship. He was like a host who let me in his house and showed his office and library but not his living and dining rooms. There was no way for me to know how he cooked his meal, ate his favorite dish, watched the television, rested on the sofa, and lived. I could understand if his bedroom and the adjacent bathroom were off limits. Early on, when he said, “You’re my friend, but I don’t feel the need to tell you what you don’t need to know,” I got his unarticulated message: “Don’t be nosy on me.”
A talented theater artist and prolific playwright, he had never talked about his success, nor had he enumerated his numerous awards or the rewards he got from them. I found out about his Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Onassis International Prize through Wikipedia that scantly mentioned his humble beginnings and personal backgrounds. That he got those awards did not really interest me. I expected him to get a lot of those; he deserved them. Who he met in Paris or slept with in Athens, to me, was more interesting, but he would not tell me.
I could have written how he leaned onto someone while walking under the glare of the streetlights along the tree-lined sidewalk of the Champs-Élysées as Edith Piaf’s vibrato soared on his ipod. He used to play “La vie en rose” for me. I could have described how someone held his hand to pull him up as he climbed the rocky hill of Areopagus just below the Acropolis under the vivid intensity of the Mediterranean sun. He told me about the burbling water in a fountain at Panepistimiou.
I could write about the places he went and the songs he listened, but not those who had passionately cared for him or those who had taken advantage of his gullible affection. I knew he had lovers; I saw their photos he used as bookmarks.
Nonetheless, what I had heard from him, seen in him, known about him were more than enough for a long but incomplete eulogy, if I had to write my memories about someone, someone still breathing, still roaming around, still looking for something he would never find. He was a very complicated man.
Proud to have known him—a man of many contradictions—I had always shared what I knew about his mind: his thoughts, reasons, inconsistencies, and absurdities. Not an easy task, where to start had bogged me down, even then. Every angle of him looked strangely different. He was as rare as his wood-rimmed eyeglasses and as flagrant as his green toy-looking wristwatch.
Nobody had really succeeded in boxing him in and restraining and suffocating him with a label. He was his own kind. Even his failings and inadequacies appeared to be uniquely his own. “Copycats are beasts,” he said when asked how he felt being widely plagiarized and mimicked by those writers and artists who had tried to appear erratic and look weird like him.
I had seen him several times display his eccentric sense of fashion. He would show up in a bamboo-printed kimono or walk around in a long pleated sarong. He would match it with a pair of sockless Gucci or Prada shoes, which he bought not for the trendy name but for its quaint design and discounted price. He set his own trend.
It was on a Monday a decade ago when the fall semester of that year just opened and the University welcomed back its long-missed prodigal son, my brilliant professor. He had spent years abroad because of the former chairman of his department who did not like him and his radical ideas about theater. He would rather exile himself than compromise to the vagaries of the bores.
Obstinate purists, his enemies in the academe tagged him as anti-theater, anti-literature, anti-everything. Philippine drama would have evolved sooner, had he stayed and slugged it out against his corybantic antagonists in the velvet-curtained proscenium.
Late for some minutes, he arrived bringing nothing with him. No books. No records. Not even a chalk or a pen. He got my attention. My curiosities—who he was, where he was from, why he was that way— began. My classmates teased me about my being a university groupie, an intellectual’s stalker they said.
I would have done the same thing if he were Tennessee Williams or Elia Kazan. I observed great minds, for a hobby. I watched fascinating people. In bars, clubs, malls or cafes, I looked for them. I should have been a psychologist; even the crazy and the solitary ones amused me.
Everything about our professor was a study—his long browned hair; his bluish pouted lips, his flexible gestures; his French-tipped fingernails; even his gastrointestinal-sounding name. We called him‘Sir Prot’. His real name was Protacio.
No microphone, his perfectly modulated voice echoed inside the soundproofed acting studio. Its pitch, on his whim, could change from baritone to falsetto. His eyes, sharp and wide as if in a hypnotic trance, intimidated us like we were in front of a star, a melodramatic star, or a queen, a hysterical queen. He, however, was neither vicious nor pompous. He just loved to exhibit his arrogant confidence expressed in his inimitable antics and orotund verbiage.
A rarity among published scholars in the university, he loathed people who used long-winding sentences to assert their never-ending circular arguments. He was fine with meaningful fragments. “Less chatter, less blooper.” He utilized drama to save a few words. Dexterously animated, his gestures evinced his intents. What his eyes could express did not need a verbal follow-up. Silence, to him, was part of speech.
Sir Prot shocked the readers of the literary magazine that published “The Emperor’s New Soliloquy,” the thoughtless work he did to enliven the stodgy atmosphere at the University. It launched a contentious debate on what prose and poetry should look like and should be. His prose was, well, blank after the title. He responded with another poem, “The Woeful One,” with a sad smiley. The rigid, intolerant noise still droning, he provoked them further with another one, “Trudging in the Chalcedony Universe of Onyx Roads and Alabaster Cliffs,” in which he filled the entire page with connected lines using his laptop’s underscore key. He had been collecting quarts and stones for his bedroom walls that time. The university debate fizzled after that “geopoetry,” a literary page as a landscape according to him. He won. He had fun.
Once, I dropped by his academic office to consult about the work of the dramatist Kara Joro and the use of masks in Japanese theater. “Sir, I’ve read ‘The Virgin’s Mask’.”
It felt awkward to start a conversation with him; I was not sure if I would sound curious or dumb or both. “Is there such a thing, a real mask worn by a virgin?”
His forehead crumpled as if he pondered upon my question with difficulty, but his eyes did not seem superciliously dismissive. No smirk. No frown. He listened.
“How do they make a mask for a virgin in Japan?” I made myself clearer this time, hoping I made sense with my question.
“What’s a virgin or virginity in Japanese culture?” I carefully composed my sentence.
“Is the mask pure white, expressionless, primitive?” I continued with cautious inflections, mildly stuttering; he had made it known early on that he had no time for wasteful nonsense—bull****ting included.
“Is a virgin totally untouched?” I expounded, expecting he would perceive the earnest intention of my inquiries.
He remained silent on all questions, as peaceful as his bare faculty room he had rarely used. I saw no clutter on the study table. The shelf, standing idly, held no books, which he did not really need as he taught his class mostly straight from memory. The mess, the dirt I saw indicated his prolonged absence and the passing of time. Dusts and cobwebs moved and shifted. The breeze, filtered by the rusty screen behind the half pulled window shutter, disturbed them.
An academic nomad, he had led a lifestyle without enough time and permanent space to settle. A wayfaring life of a gypsy appealed to him. He had been in the university for almost twenty years, but he had spent most of the time on foreign travels and university visits. The year before he decided to come home, he was a visiting professor at a Mongolian university, where he studied the horse fiddle called Morin Khuur. He went all over to teach and learn, finding and creating something new and unheard of in the process. Before Ulan Bator, he was a French Government scholar in Paris translating the works of the twentieth-century European playwrights into Tagalog, the literary language of the Filipinos. He also received a grant from a Chinese organization to study Peking Opera in Beijing. His Chinese seemed fluent; the noodle guy near his house understood him. Sir Prot traveled everywhere searching for drama.
Persistent, I did not stop, thinking he was just being pensive and miserly since it was after lunch, the usual time for afternoon siesta. I badly needed some references for my paper. “Is innocence enough a mask for a virgin?” I said with a feeling that I was doing a monologue. More questions from me and no answer from him.
At forty, Sir Prot’s face still exuded the adventurous mien of youth. His skin still glowed. He could pass as a mestizo—half Spanish and half something. Suffused with shades of pink looking like rashes, his cheeks flushed when hit by sunlight. No embarrassment could turn him red. He did not mind when I gawked at his chin dotted with a huge ripe pimple, which completed the imaginary question mark on his face that arched from his creased forehead and curved down to his fastened lips. It looked like I did not make sense to him, after all.
“Okay, Sir, I’ll just come back some other day.” I gave up, forcing myself to think that maybe he was not in the mood to talk. To me, the cold shoulder I got from him meant I had to change course and go back to the easier one, Chekhov. Artists could be selfish with their ideas too, the only rationale I could assume. I had no choice but to turn my back and leave worsted.
Before I could hold onto the knob and open the door, he spoke like a Zen monk who just broke his meditation. “Sorry, I just had a yellow-curried chicken; I haven’t brushed yet.” I could not control my laugh.
Like a sage with his calm and precise words, he began, “Everyone is a virgin, and everyone has a mask of innocence.”
I quickly turned my back and walked towards the chair by his study table. I cleared the dust that must have settled on the furniture a long time ago, pulled the incomplete cobweb on its backrest, and sat as if I was offered. Although gaps and pauses vacillated his responses, we talked just about anything that afternoon but ourselves. My patience worked. That day, we became friends and I learned how deep and penetrating silence could be.