Angelica’s Daughters: A Dugtungan Novel

By Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Erma Cuizon, Susan Evangelista and 2 more

“This collective and collaborative novel proves that writers share much more than just an interest in, as one of the authors puts it, ‘the idea of creating something of rare beauty out of nothing at all.’ They share a Creative Unconscious that, when working on a common text, comes up with startling and unpredictable imaginative delights and insights.”

— Isagani R. Cruz, Philippine Star

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9789712728921

Book preview

This collective and collaborative novel proves that writers share much more than just an interest in, as one of the authors puts it, ‘the idea of creating something of rare beauty out of nothing at all.’ They share a Creative Unconscious that, when working on a common text, comes up with startling and unpredictable imaginative delights and insights. This tale of two women living a century apart (and the women and men in their lives) told sequentially by five women is truly an ensemble performance worth a standing ovation.

ISAGANI R. CRUZ, Philippine Star

"Chick lit with a comfortable dose of smartness and historical verve. Angelica’s Daughters celebrates audacious heroines primed by deep passion and fairytale romance! Set in the heat of a 19th-century Asian revolution and what its setting becomes by the 21st Century, this novel beguiles with its mythic splendor, threat of a generational curse, masterful betrayals, and female leads readers can fall in love with.

The story found itself as one writer finished her chapter without consulting the others, and passed it on for the next writer in line to do with as she pleased. The amazing result is a delightful read by five writers who cherish their Hispanic, Filipino, and American cultural roots.

FELICE PRUDENTE STA. MARIA, award-winning author

"Part of the pleasure of reading Angelica’s Daughters, the engrossing new collaborative novel by five established Filipina writers, is seeing how deftly the authors deal with the challenge of writing in this resurrected literary form. A dugtungan is a genre of Tagalog novel popular early in the 20th century, in which each writer creates a chapter and hands it off to the next, who writes another chapter without direction. The result, in this case, is an ensemble performance that contains something of the exhilaration of theatrical improv. One watches these accomplished authors inventively weave a historical romance, creating gripping heroines and turns of plot, crossing decades and national boundaries, tapping into cultural roots of the Philippines, Spain and America. Reading Angelica’s Daughters is a gripping experience."

BRIAN ASCALON ROLEY,

award-winning author of American Son: A Novel

Disclaimer

Angelica’s Daughters is a work of fiction. Characters, places, situations, events, and even recipes, should not be taken as whole truth or fact.

Angelica’s Daughters: A Dugtungan Novel

by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Erma Cuizon, Susan Evangelista

Veronica Montes, Nadine Sarreal

Copyright © Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Erma Cuizon

Susan Evangelista, Veronica Montes, Nadine Sarreal, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed

in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system,

without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations

embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Pictures used in this book are reprinted courtesy of

the owners, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Veronica Montes,

and Nadine Sarreal.

Published and exclusively distributed by

ANVIL PUBLISHING, INC.

7th Floor Quad Alpha Centrum Building

125 Pioneer Street, Mandaluyong City

1550 Philippines

Trunk Lines: ([phone], 477-4755 to 57

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[e-mail]

Fax: [phone]

www.anvilpublishing.com

Cover design by Ariel Dalisay

Book design by Ani V. Habúlan

ISBN 978-971-27-2892-1 (e-book)

Printed in the Philippines

We, the authors of Angelica’s Daughters, are proud to present our collaborative work of fiction to the public at last. The five of us—Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Erma Cuizon, Susan Evangelista, Veronica Montes, and Nadine Sarreal— have worked on this novel, off and on, since 2003.

Angelica’s Daughters is a story about a diverse group of modern Filipinas—among them a young FilAm whose marriage has disintegrated, an even younger Cebuana involved in a forbidden love affair, and a ballroom-dancing Lola—who share a common ancestor, the beautiful Angelica Nazario de los Santos. As these women investigate the history of their illustrious foremother, they also learn to understand and deal with their own lack of wisdom in love.

Our history of writing together began in 2002, when we were all members of the PALH’s Master Writing Workshop, an online endeavor dreamed up by Cecilia. PALH stands for Cecilia’s Philippine American Literary House, a web site that publishes and sells books and Philippine antiques. Cecilia gathered her writing friends, and each agreed to take turns leading the group. Every Wednesday, the group leader emailed a writing prompt, and the members would post their responses online by the weekend. We would then read and critique one another’s work. After a month or so, someone else would take over the responsibility of leading the group and posting the prompts.

We were from Manila and Cebu and Singapore and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Palawan, but we could all meet at ease in cyberspace. People joined, and people dropped out—Noelle de Jesus, Libay Linsangan Cantor, Marianne Villanueva and others were all with us for awhile—but the smaller group responsible for this novel endured. We all had bad weeks and good weeks, and we all ended up with some favorites among our short writings. Some were even published as short stories.

Eventually we felt we had exhausted our writing prompt exercises, and we were ready for a new challenge. Cecilia had read about a style of writing popular in the Philippines during the 1920s-1930s called the dugtungan or connecting novel—a collaborative effort in which one writer would work on one portion of the novel, then pass this on to the next writer, and so on, until the novel was completed. We decided to try this process with a short story. The result was a funny piece called New Tricks, which we wrote under the pen name Celinosan Montreal (a bizarre combination of our first and last names). Much to our delight, the story was accepted for publication in SAWI: Funny Essays, Stories and Poems on All Kinds of Heartbreaks (Milflores, 2007).

Not too long after this initial success, we decided to attempt a dugtungan novel. We agreed to focus on a relatively light romance featuring some elements of Philippine history and a modern-day Filipina American. Again utilizing the indispensable Internet, we shared vintage photographs that appealed to our writer’s imaginations and some writing prompts to get us started.

We wrote in an order established by Nadine by a magical formula, with Veronica starting us off. Marianne Villanueva was with us at the beginning of the project, and she contributed one very valuable character in the person of Teban, the disheveled revolutionary painter with whom Angelica falls in love. Other work crowded in on Marianne, and she reluctantly dropped this project.

Some of us have a rather proprietary interest in one or more characters. Veronica gave us a brilliant beginning, creating both Tess and Angelica, and the legends surrounding the latter. Susan created Jesusa, and fleshed out Lola Josefina with Veronica. Erma, our voice from Cebu, created Dina, while Cebuana expat Cecilia, who is a fervent admirer of her home city, filled in history, places, and local color for Angelica’s travels there. Cecilia and Nadine developed Angelica, her history, and her love story together.

Says Veronica about this character, the soul of the novel, while Cecilia and Nadine gave Angelica the flesh and blood that transformed her into a real person (in a way, I might add, that I never could have imagined! I’ll never forget seeing Angelica’s report card for the first time . . . ), I did, indeed, dream her up. I even remember combing through my dad’s La Salle yearbook to put together her name!

Watching other people run with our characters was a heady experience for us all. Two years after those first exciting chapters, Cecilia and Nadine submitted the first draft, which was critiqued as needing more work. After a brief period of doubting ourselves and the novel, we began the work of rewriting Angelica’s Daughters. Veronica did much of this rewriting, since she was intent on tying the episodes and chapters together around Tess, the protagonist whom she had created. The group acknowledges and thanks Veronica for her perseverance and dedication.

Here then is the novel, Angelica’s Daughters, which we hope will entertain the reader, and which will focus attention on the dugtungan or connecting novel, a unique Filipino literary tradition that draws on the spirit of teamwork and collaboration.

October 20, 2009

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

Erma Cuizon

Susan Evangelista

Veronica Montes

Nadine Sarreal

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

They say Maria Angelica Nazario de los Santos was the most beautiful woman of her time; that one of her eyes was blue, one green; that requests for her hand numbered in the hundreds; that one bitter rival poisoned a cup of Spanish chocolate, had it served to her for merienda, and then went mad when the desired effect failed to materialize.

They say all that and much, much more. xi

Tess lay in bed and ran her hands over the flat expanse of her stomach. She spread her long fingers, placed her open palm beneath her navel and, as she had done nearly every night for the past two years, whispered a prayer and shut her eyes against the thick air of failure that filled the bedroom.

Beside her, Tonio stirred. A quiet groan and then he whispered, You okay?

Tess said nothing for a few minutes, wondering what would happen if she told him about the toddler she’d seen being pushed in his stroller that morning near the library. Just as Tess passed by, the child—immensely fat, with a head of red curls—had reached out and grabbed her hand as if attempting to impart an urgent message. She bent over in greeting, and when he smiled up at her, Tess knew. She just knew. She ran home, grabbed one of the dozen pregnancy tests out of the hallway linen closet, and shut herself up in the bathroom.

Twenty minutes later, though, her life was exactly as it had been an hour before, and she realized with a renewed bitterness that God was not sending her messages through the random gestures of children and that she had been a fool to think so. No, I’m not okay, she wanted to tell Tonio. I haven’t been okay for months, and I don’t think anything will be okay until we have a baby.

But like so many other things that she wanted to say to her husband, this confession remained unvoiced. They had been married eight years, and by now Tess understood that such a story would only be met with exasperation by her leftbrained, engineer husband. I’m fine, she’d answered instead. She waited for Tonio to open his arms and gather her in close, but he had already fallen back to sleep.

This most recent pregnancy test disaster happened just before Tess and Tonio were expected to arrive at a christening in San Francisco, a half hour drive away. She used to look forward to these social occasions as a dependable source of laughter, gossip, and comfort food, but now they were nothing but a nuisance. This particular branch of the family— her father’s side—lived their lives wide open to each other, and their inability to censor anything that came out of their mouths caused Tess pain. She and Tonio were met with a constant barrage of questions about when they would start a family, tiresome jokes about shooting blanks, and reminders— as if she didn’t know!—that she was quickly getting old. Naku! said one tita or another. I had three already by the time I was your age!

Recently, Tess had begun to look to Tonio to rescue her from these difficult moments. She needed, more than ever, to feel like part of a team, to feel their lives were truly bound together and that nothing—not their non-existent baby, not the mechanical lovemaking they had resigned themselves to in their attempts to conceive, not the resentment they felt towards each other every time Tess’ period arrived—could matter one bit when placed beside the eight years they had been married. But Tonio was rarely at her side at these functions. When she found him, he would inevitably be outside, fifty yards away, smoking a cigarette and talking on his phone. It always took him a few minutes to notice her, and when he did, he held up a hand as if to say in a minute, I’ll be there in a minute, and turned his back to her. The first few times it happened, Tess assumed there must be a problem at work, a pressing issue that had to be solved before Monday. But it had been a few months now, and she realized she had been wrong all along: there was no problem at work.

And so she would swallow hard and return to this party or that, bearing the questions and intrusions with a tight smile. At these moments, Tess longed for the more restrained, even mysterious, presence of her mother’s family. Lola Josefina, especially, had a calm about her that Tess found soothing. She missed her terribly now, and knew with certainty that Lola was the one person who could help lead her out of the anger and sadness caused by the fact that she couldn’t find a way to do anything about what was happening, or not happening, in her life.

When Tess was a ponytailed girl in Manila sitting at the foot of Lola Josefina’s chair, she was treated to tales about budding romances between houseboys and young maids fresh from the province; about schoolchildren caught spying on the secret lives of nuns; about the hardship of life during the war. And while she listened, fascinated, to all of these stories (often while sucking absentmindedly on a li hing mui), it was the ones about Angelica she loved the most. She committed every detail to memory and believed every word. It seemed completely plausible, for example, that not just one but several of Angelica’s suitors had entered the priesthood after her firm (though never cruel) rejections.

Tess and her family left Manila for Chicago when she was nine years old so that her father, an architect, could follow a job lead that never actually materialized. After a single winter in that windiest of cities, they re-settled in California. It only took a few years before Tess, like her American counterparts, began to display a jaded personality and lost her