Note: This essay of mine was published in Pen & Ink,
The Philippine Literary Quarterly, Book 3, 1998, pp. 134-138
We have all seized the white perimeter as our
own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning
pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
- Billy Collins, “Marginalia”
In one of a collection of essays by George
Steiner, No Passion Spent, he writes
that “marginalia are the immediate indices of the reader’s response to the
text, of the dialogue between the book and himself.” I cannot agree with him more. But beyond that, I must say that marginalia are more complicated creatures:
they not only chronicle the affair between text and reader, but guide us into a
web-like universe of multiple texts and readers. I know this because I have
lived intimately with marginalia my whole life.
I grew up tracking and receiving a trail of
things my dead mother left me: a gold pendant, several trinkets in her wooden
jewelry box, a stainless steel watch that a neighbor in his sixties found
“cute.” But most treasured of all were the things she made with her hands: odd
and vivid paintings, that battered old photo album where she left a spontaneous
essay on the inside covers (philosophic questions and reflections written in
staccato, the most beautiful thing I had ever read and the closest I had come
to poetry), and lastly, the precious, frantic notes and studies on the margins
and fly leaves of her novels.
I grew up reading my dead mother’s
scribblings—the almost desperate, spidery red writing—lining the books that
would later become my favorites: the Alexandria
Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. And in that cozy, textual world I would
imagine the three of us in my grandmother’s living-room where my mother’s
paintings hang: Durrell with crossed legs, in rumpled, travel-worn clothes,
smoking; my mother in her favorite polka-dot mini-dress, also smoking; and
myself, in jeans and sandals, waving away their collective smoke and enjoying the
conversation immensely. Now, that’s marginalia for me.
Like a tête-á-tête, there in the borders,
written precariously, were the token notes, the intricate little clues she had
gathered chapter after chapter, each discovery punctuated by an exclamation
point as eloquent as her breathless “Wow!” Among the cream-colored pages I
found tantalizing statements like “Pursewarden’s tendency?” I could almost
imagine her raised eyebrow, as if any moment she might jab me in the ribs and
ask her favorite author in a low whisper, “Is it true?” These breathed life
into my first encounter with literature. I have, in fact, joined the fray, by
adding my cautious and conservative blank ink next to her (flaming) red scarlet
question: “This is Clea’s letter now so it pertains to Clea’s would-be affair,”
as if to lightly chide her for her over-excited reading.
I share a conspiratorial smile when I read I
read what my mother wrote: “This is me!” This, in reference to that awful,
heartless woman who laughs at love—the original Justine (Hosnani), the defiant
anti-heroine of the quartet. “Your mother was maldita” explained an aunt. (This was before she supposedly
softened up with motherhood). I laugh at that and hear my mother’s laughter.
Beautiful, gamine, free-spirited, vain, independent, intelligent, and above
all, in possession of a self-deprecating humor…None of these descriptions had
been volunteered by my father. These were things she left behind in her
marginalia, in the generous light-hearted strokes of her handwriting, in her
free and unique penchant for the lower-case. I have formed a kinship with her
books. They offer me more than a voyeuristic glimpse into a private
conversation between reader and text: they have opened their arms to me because
they are places my mother walked. Somewhere in the corridors, she grabs my arm
and brings me back to her girlhood home where we can huddle with Durrell and
“talk art.” There it does not matter that I have craved her maternal tenderness
all my life.
She
writes, boldly underlined: “…shocking grotesquerie of purgated love.” And in
another page, quite wisely, she states, “There is mystery after mystery but
never for mystery’s sake. Mystification is one of the principal strategies by
which Durrell communicates his sense of relativity. There are truths in
abundance, but there is NO Truth.” Sometimes I imagine that she knew I would
tread the same ground. But that is what we all feel when we read or write
marginalia. It is a moment of tender revelation for us, or shocked discovery
when we take our pen and dare to write our rage, our understanding, our
sadness. They are written not only for ourselves but for the next reader. “I
cannot help it, it must be said.” There is nothing shy, nothing restrained in
the writing of marginalia. They are stories beside the story.
Dozens of
stories wait with bated breath to be told along the invitingly blank spaces of
a book leaf. Inscribed in a thousand and one varieties, these proofs of
readership beckon to us, meriting more than a cursory glance. They awaken the
romantic beneath our leathery skeptic selves. They teach us to grow away from
the clean, freshly-cut leaves of new acquisitions toward the musty, ink and
oil-stained appeal of a book with a past. Nothing compares to the serendipitous
joy of discovering a musty, old tome that belonged to—what luck!—a favorite
writer, a former professor. And also we find those rare ones, painful, lines
crowded in a corner: “I bought this book when my mother died.” Beside it are
dried teardrops, marked by three irregularly shaped, blue-edged spots.
Through
the books my mother left me I have come to realize the weight of having been
named. For names have so much to do with life. A book is not possessed until it
is branded by the name of its owner, it gains its face from the stamp, and the
bookplate that marks it purchased, given, received.
When I
was small my yaya told me I was named
after an Egyptian princess. That suited me just fine. And I was, in fact, quite
proud. But the books in my possession always hinted at more. And then I finally
understood later on: Justine was no Egyptian princess. She was a self-torturing
Jewess who happened to live in Egypt. She was a wounded woman, a woman who
could wish that love were another word, perhaps evol; part of “evolution,” inverted the way God can be reversed to
“dog.” I could not understand why she named me after this woman. Much later, I
realized that I was actually named after her stepdaughter (the offspring of
Nessim, Justine’s husband, and Melissa, Darley’s mistress), the blank child,
the one Darley chooses to name after Justine, as if to redeem her.
In the
ritual of naming, of being hailed, I saw another facet of this woman: Ditas, my
mother. A side I did not know and did not wish to know. For she was a wounded
woman as well, a woman full of rage and sorrow, a woman capable of predicting
her own death (I heard she only gained ire by this). A woman who quarreled with
my father constantly and wallowed in self-pity. If I cringed at being named
after Justine Hosnani, then I cringed even more at this dark side of my mother.
She shared not a few things in common with the original Justine. My questioning
was in fact a terrible accusation against her: How could you be this cruel,
tortured woman?
I feel
her answer. I feel it in the very desperation of her writing: the angry
redness, the manic haste. It is the same desperation with which she sought to
be loved. And there it shines, rising from behind the complex shadows of
characters, the mystery of all that is written and left to be read: that she
has loved, and this is what she has reaped. Imperfect as she was, I need no
more explanations about her self-perceived failures. All is forgiven in the
face of this love.
Alexandria
has become my spiritual birthplace. Never have I lived more intensely than in
the span of time it took me to read and countlessly re-read the favorite four
books of my mother. I will never forget those first few lines read at four
years old: “The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind…a sky
of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places…” I was forever
enthralled and I knew that I would read these books relentlessly through life.
The
colors, sounds, and textures of Alexandria are forever described in my mother’s
voice, as though she were leaving me a metropolis as inheritance. And truly, I
have inherited that city. Beside Cinderella
in kindergarten I had Justine (on
which you will still find my childish scrawl), believing them both to be
princesses in the happily-ever-after. In between Nancy Drew books there were
nights I silently grieved for an English schoolteacher hidden away on an
island, remembering a woman with a low, harsh laugh. As I trudged through Jane
Austen and Thomas Hardy in high school I began to realize, with shock, the true
nature of my namesake. And in full-fledged understanding as a college student I
began to appreciate the complexity, the amazing richness of a city as beautiful
and ugly as its inhabitants. Throughout this life-long affair my mother greeted,
me, talked to me, wept with me. I was led through Alexandria’s gates on the arm
and under the aegis of an intensely beautiful woman, a woman from whom I
inherited, both literally and figuratively, my eyes.
Durrell
writes: “The central topic of the book is an investigation of modern love…it
would be worth trying an experiment to see if we cannot discover a
morphological form one might appropriately call ‘classical’—for our time. Even
if the result proved to be a ‘science fiction’ in the true sense.”
And from
Alexandria my mother found herself and harvested my name. Peering through the
many fictions of truth and love that both of us have gained. And I am the
luckiest, because in the last instance, my mother left me with a gift more
potent than blood: in her marginalia she stamped her life—complex, rich, not
without a great amount of pain…but always a surrender to love. Like the madmen
and the prophets who have emerged from that ancient city we bear its searing
mark.
I have
met the beautiful girl who had written so poignantly on the margins of my
favorite books; I have met her as my mother and myself. And how vastly my
loneliness deepened because of the many spaces she filled in my heart and in my
life! Paradox, yes, and wonderfully so. In the realm of marginalia there is no
time.
It is a
room in my grandfather’s house in Cebu where my mother’s paintings hang, where
Lawrence Durrell points outside the window and says, “Ah, here comes your
mother and Justine Hosnani! Look how dusty they are from walking in the market
stalls!” and I sit smiling in anticipation of the watermelon ices I am sure
they have bought for me.
