The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia
colonial-mindedness of the staff bothered Bencab. “Hindi ko masakyan [I couldn’t stand it],” he explains. “I remember this one writer—he had been with the service for a while—who was telling me how he felt about two officers. One was a white American, the other was a short, dark Filipino. This writer said, look at us, we’re so ugly. He could hardly wait to immigrate to the United States: If you worked for the service for fifteen years, the come-on was you could go to America.”
For the educated Christian Filipino like Bencab or myself, this racial self-hatred was very much a part of growing up. The unremitting emphasis in school was on ignoring inconvenient details like race, cultural geography, and a history of warfare, abuse, and suppression. At the Ateneo de Manila High School, speaking Tagalog—or the “dialect,” as it was referred to—was forbidden, as though the native tongue were a repository of dark, unmentionable secrets, an omnipotent mantra, that could slough off our Western conditioning like unwanted skin. The history we had been taught was one informed thoroughly by the West. Our own stories were deemed relevant only in relation to the Spanish and American colonial periods, and even then it was a history written from the point of view of the victors, presenting a benign view of colonialism. (I don’t recall a single instance at school when the term was even used.) In the process, our tongue, our own sense of it, had temporarily disappeared. The impact of such an education was all too evident, for example, in our sense of aesthetics. Whether expressed in the clothing we wore—Levis, Arrow shirts, Florsheim, Nike—or in the music we preferred—rock, disco, Latin, jazz—our (hi-fi and stereophonic) fidelity to and feel for Western pop culture had few equals. The end result? I was drenched in nostalgia for places in the West I had never been to.
In terms of earthly beauty, it was no different—let my face be done on earth as it is in heaven. The Catholic icons revered by most of the country—the weepy but beautiful Madonna; her pink-cheeked, plump Santo Niño, or Holy Child; Christ as a handsome, bearded, incandescent ascetic—bore little resemblance to the masses who prayed, wept, and often crawled at their feet. No doubt a large number of the devotees wanted to be lighter-skinned, to have aquiline noses, be a little taller. The fairer, the better; Spanish or Caucasian American mestizas were prized. And so the silver screen echoed the national preference. The language used in local films may have been Tagalog, but the matinee idols had noses and eyes of a distinctly European origin. So it puzzled me as a teenager when I saw hulking American servicemen on leave, strolling on Roxas Boulevard accompanied by petite dark women I considered unattractive, women I presumed worked in bars.
It wasn’t so much what these women did that bothered me and my friends, it was that they looked “native.” Mukhang chimay, we would say, or “servant-faced,” our ultimate put-down for those women who failed to meet the standards we took for granted. Dark skin meant servility, undesirability, the wrong class. By reminding me of the traditions I had been separated from, these women threatened to disrupt a seemingly well-ordered but actually fragile and narrow world. Only later did I acknowledge the stirrings of attraction for these non-Caucasian-looking women of the night
Bencab’s work at the USIS made him begin to see the absurdity of all this. He quit and joined a now-defunct daily The Manila Times. Beatriz Romualdez—a niece of Imelda Marcos who would later marry Henry, my oldest brother—was also with the paper as a writer. She had just opened a café on Mabini Street in the Malate district of Manila, called Café Indios Bravos. It included gallery space that she rented out to Bencab and some other painters. Living in quarters above the gallery, Bencab met Manila’s literati and a lot of foreigners at the café. “I was naïve then: We all were. It was the sixties, a lot of things coming up, the miniskirt”—he laughed at this unintended pun—“marijuana, the Beatles. And Indios was the place to be then.”
It was at Indios that Bencab met his wife, a friend of Beatriz’s named Caroline Kennedy. Originally from London, Caroline had a blonde patrician beauty; in the eyes of Indios regulars she represented the desired Western sexual avatar, one completely different from those dusky women desired by American servicemen. She was very sixties —decked out in beads and paisley prints—and, because she was the new blonde in town, eagerly pursued.
At the end of the 1960s, the Indios gallery closed even though Bencab’s first one-man show there had been very successful. People simply weren’t buying. He and Caroline, already a pair, moved to London. There, for the sum of £3.50, they had a registry wedding. Bencab described those early years in London as “very exciting, very exotic.” By the following year, 1970, he had had his first show at a gallery in Greenwich. He soon developed a clientele that included the movie actress Glenda Jackson and Harold Pinter. But he also developed a pain in his stomach. Thinking it was appendicitis, he went to his wife’s family doctor. The diagnosis? Bencab was tense. He had had an overdose of Caroline’s family. They were friendly but patronizing, with that peculiar upper-class English mix of proper behavior and snotty derisiveness. He missed Mabini Street, familiar places, the friendliness of his own people.
Shortly after the birth of their first child, Eleazar, in 1971, Bencab and Caroline returned to Manila. A year later, Marcos declared martial law. Though they were a much sought-after couple socially, when Eleazar started reciting martial law slogans, they decided to return to London in 1974. This time, having begun to accept his life abroad, Bencab liked London.
But people there never quite knew how to react to him. And where there was prejudice, even if not overt, there was usually ignorance as well. “Once they found out I was from the Philippines,” Ben recalls, “people would say, ‘Oh the Philippines. It’s hot there, isn’t it?’ Talking about the weather is neutral, you don’t really offend anyone.” But feelings would slip through now and then. “The nanny of Caroline’s sister’s kids, when she saw Eleazar, exclaimed, ‘Oh, he’s so brown, isn’t he? But we love him anyway.’ She was South African.”
Sometimes it was funny. “We were in Majorca, and one day Eleazar was throwing a tantrum, refusing to eat his food. My motherin-law reprimanded him, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are compared to your Asian brothers!’”
In London, Bencab quickly realized that if he followed what was current in Western art, he would always be a second-rate artist, since the impulse for such art didn’t come from within, wasn’t part of his skin. He started to go over his collection of Filipiniana that he had slowly built up over the years, a lot of it from colonial-era texts written by the English and the Americans. He thought, “How come Japanese prints from the Edo period, works that were uniquely Japanese, came to be appreciated? There was a conscientious shift in me, to look to Filipino material.”
“The first piece I did was Portrait of a Servant Girl, which was based on a turn-of-the-century photo. I wanted to show both the servility of the Pinoy and the innate dignity. After all, it’s sheer economics that forces most domestics to be domestics.” Bencab himself had proletarian roots, having grown up in Bambang—a working-class district of Manila—where his ties were still very strong.
That was the beginning of a whole series of noncommissioned portraits of Filipinos in the diaspora. (I was the subject for one. Titled Greencard Holder, it shows me standing in the Soho kitchen of my old cold-water flat, bathtub in the background.) Since then, Bencab has become fascinated with what he terms “very Filipino gestures” expressed in such emotions as gratitude and jealousy. He talked about how traditional Cordilleran art, especially its sculptural aspects, had influenced him. The figures inhabiting Bencab’s canvasses are indeed sculptural, exhibiting distinctly Cordilleran features—broad faces, rounded limbs and torsos, heavy feet.
By 1983, Bencab’s marriage to Caroline had turned rocky. That same year, Marcos’s most well-known political foe, Benigno Aquino Jr., was assassinated as he stepped off the plane returning him to Manila after a three-year exile in Boston—a murder that spelled the beginning of the end for the Marcoses. Bencab was in Spain when the news broke. He felt left out by history. “I asked myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ I was isolated.” In 1985, he and Caroline were formally divorced, and he flew back to the Philippines shortly thereafter. Instead of resettling in Manila, he chose Baguio, where a small but vibrant artists’ community had formed. “In my mind I wanted to be in Baguio. The cool weather. Good friends, my interest