He was so bored after the dreary, eventless weeks in Venice, when each day that went by had seemed to confirm his personal safety and to emphasise the dullness of his existence.
A fascinating character, this Tom Ripley. Stunning prose by Highsmith. (I’ve seen the film years ago – also a fine piece of work.) Enough twists to deliver jitters, and a feeling of guilt at times as you can’t help but celebrate Tom’s morbid successes. That sonofabitch.
Now I want to tour Europe.
Full disclosure: I used to live in Unit 8H-B in Kingswood Condominium here in Makati. The unit’s caretakers were Julius Villareal and a woman named Icy, possibly his girlfriend. Right now, I’m hoping they’ll suffer from diarrhea for the rest of their lives. And I’m being very nice here.
* * *
Here’s what happened:
I came home from work on Feb. 24 and found two of my flatmates/unitmates in the living room. One said, “There’s a new development!” There’s always a new development, with Julius and Icy as caretakers – the ref breaks down, the kitchen sink floods the floor, cable TV gets disconnected, and they don’t answer your calls. Such an efficient couple, Julius and Icy.
But this new development, as it turned out, was crazy. Like, you-can’t-make-this-shit-up crazy. Julius and Icy, according to one of the guards of the condo (bless him for warning us), have not been paying the unit’s utility bills and condo dues for three months now, and so Admin, possibly as ordered by the unit owners, had began padlocking the units they were handling. One group renting one of the units came home from work one night and just found their unit padlocked. Their stuff were inside. Luckily the unit owner lives in the building, so they were able to talk to the guy, have the door opened, and collect their things. But if the owner was not in the building, and you didn’t know the owner’s contact details, where will you go?
We decided to confront Icy. We knew she and Julius lived in the building, 12D-A, and I was just looking forward to screaming at her. We asked the guard, and oh yes, their unit had been padlocked. They don’t live in the building anymore. We couldn’t contact their phones.
The plan: Talk to the unit owner. We didn’t know his number so I had to go to Marketing the next day and try to contact him from there.
Of course we panicked. I couldn’t sleep that night. The next morning, one of my flatmates was able to contact the caretaker of a unit which had a room good for four, had an AC, and had its own bathroom. We viewed it that morning. Turned out the caretaker knew all the shenanigans Julius and Icy had been doing. Those fuckers. The guards downstairs were already cautioning us to at least have our stuff moved to another unit, if we had a friend in the building. We wouldn’t be issued gate passes, so we couldn’t move appliances out of the building, even if we owned them. Including laptops.
It is safe to say that the stress level by then was extremely high.
We decided to rent the room and move in that day.
So I hauled ass, you know. I was able to move everything except my collages on my wall. My collages! I used crazy-sticky tape because I thought – well, I thought I’d be staying in that room for a long time.
Of course I had to do the security deposit + advance thing all over again, but it’s okay. Julius and Icy I think owes me a month’s worth of deposit, unless they’ve deducted all the excess bills, which I’m sure they have. I feel bad for my flatmates who paid them for the month of February. Seriously, do Julius and Icy gamble? Are they addicted to meth or something? Where do they take our money?
But at least we were able to find a place we could stay in for the next six months. (This time we have direct contact to the unit owner; we also know his bank accounts and his address.) I used to rent a room of my own, but right now I can’t be choosy. The room’s nice anyway. And clean. Right now it looks like a college dorm room. Peeling wall paint, towels and bras on the racks, small cabinets and compartments, instant noodles and other food packets in see-through containers, my books on the bottom of my mattress.
The first morning I was there I moved so slowly, as if I were lethargic, not knowing where everything was. Now where did I put my bags? Where did I put a copy of my contract? Where are my DVDs? Where’s my coffee?
But I’m good, I’ll get by.
I still want Julius and Icy to pay us back, though.
And I want my collages back. Hmp.
* * *
Anywho my final February weekend was great. Spent most of the time eating chicken teriyaki with the boyfriend, who, bless him, knows how to cook.
Also watched my first Dungeons & Dragons game. :) Being the eternal backseat player and annoying game-watcher (ask my brothers), I can never play this game, or any game really, but I had fun. :D Mike’s Addie brought excellent cookies!
Last photo was taken by Jme. Thanks!
* * *
The Demons of the New Year cover (it’s a horror e-anthology, and I’m gonna be in it yay) has also been unveiled. I love it!
Finally saw this film. Absolutely entertaining, love the dialogue, a Nazi film couldn’t be more enjoyable, blah-blah-blah, I’ll bore you with my praises. Didn’t realize how much I missed Tarantino’s crazies until I saw this.
Didn’t care much for Brad Pitt (I enjoyed Casey Affleck’s performance more in The Assassination of Jesse James – and Pitt here is basically playing James again it seems, accent and dirty clothes and all), but good grief Christoph Waltz!
His performance is divine. I want to see more of this actor. Just so I can stop saying, “He’s my favorite Nazi”.
My poem is now posted on SIM’s website, along with Mark Anthony Cayanan’s “But What I Really Want to Say Is”. :)
Teeny-Tiny-Erratum: I don’t have a “Ma. (Maria)” in my name. Heh.
Detective Cassie Maddox takes the name Lexie Madison for a case. She gets stabbed, the case folds, and Cassie is taken out of undercover work. Later, a young woman who looks like Cassie is found dead in the tiny Irish village of Glenskehy. The woman’s name? Lexie Madison.
“Lexie” lives with four friends in a house called Whitethorn in the village. One of the detectives on the case thinks one of the friends is the murderer. Now Cassie’s assignment is this: enter the house and pretend to be the dead girl. Serve as bait.
I first encountered Tana French’s writing in In the Woods, which also features Cassie (her partner, Detective Rob Ryan, serves as narrator). French remains as sharp as ever. Writing so superb that you can feel the hush of Whitethorn House as the door closes. Beautiful.
My poem, “Night: Notes”, will appear in this week’s (Feb. 21 issue) Sunday Inquirer Magazine. I just received my compli copy, and since I was eating glorious hideous fast food French fries when it came I smeared ketchup on it! Huzzah! :D
Do buy a copy. I personally like this poem.
Good poems make you want to write something pretty. :) Here are two from Katie Ford.
“Colosseum” is excellent. A bit long, so just read it over here. When one is the site of so much pain, one must pray/ to be abandoned.
She talks about her collection in this interview. (I want a copy of it eeee. ♥)
Here’s another poem:
Nocturne
by Katie Ford
I can see the whole city, lights edging the harbor like yellow pins in uneven
cloth beneath the hands of a woman cutting the measured lines of a dress:
when it is done she will put it on to see if it fits.
Blackish harbor, facing east no facing west, lights
meaning anything but exit, ships waiting for dawn so they can navigate out,
fog in the cove, cigarette smoke in this
restaurant at the top of the Prudential.
Please do not use your hands to touch my face.
Please let me be decided.
Lights fringe the harbor, she is sewing a dress a centimeter too small,
you tap off the ashes, I lean into the winding smoke because it is not a myth,
because I can bring even an ending into the body.
The city now unsettled beneath us. My face eye-level in the class.
Please help me get up from this table.
Please put that thing down.
She turns an edge under. Smoke is taken in, smoke like a text
etched into two tablets of lung. Here, and here: Sinai.
Atoms fill their due portion of each ash.
Please look somewhere else with your eyes.
She undoes the knotted threads where she wants the blue and gray strips closer
to each other, crop of lavender, dust.
Please do not touch my face.
When she is done she takes off her clothes, raises her arms to get into the dress.
Please do not touch my face.
The harbor at its darkest, stillest, like a question in a throat.
I stared at the ruin, the powder of the dead now beneath ground, a crowd assembled and breathing with indiscernible sadnesses, light from other light, far off and without explanation. Somewhere unseen the ocean deepened then and now into more ocean, the black fins of the bony fish obscuring its bottommost floor, carcasses of mollusks settling, casting one last blur of sand, unable to close again. Next to me a woman, the seventeen pins it took to set her limb, to keep every part flush with blood. * In the book on the ancient mayfly which lives only four hundred minutes and is, for this reason, called ephemeral, I couldn't understand why the veins laid across the transparent sheets of wings, impossibly fragile, weren't blown through in their half-day of flight. Or how that design has carried the species through antiquity with collapsing horses, hailstorms and diffracted confusions of light. * If I remember correctly what's missing broke off all at once, not into streets but into rows portioned off for shade as it fell here, the sun there where the poled awning ended. Didn't the heat and dust funnel down to the condemned as they fought until the animal took them completely? Didn't at least one stand perfectly still? * I said to myself: Beyond my husband there are strange trees growing on one of the seven hills. They look like intricately tended bonsais, but enormous and with unreachable hollows. He takes photographs for our black folios, thin India paper separating one from another. There is no scientific evidence of consciousness lasting outside the body. I think when I die it will be completely. * But it didn't break off all at once. It turns out there is a fault line under Rome that shook the theater walls slight quake by quake. After the empire fell the arena was left untended and exotic plants spread a massive overgrowth, their seeds brought from Asia and Africa, sewn accidentally in the waste of the beasts. Like our emptying, then aching questions, the vessel filled with unrecognizable faunas. * How great is the darkness in which we grope, William James said, not speaking of the earth, but the mind split into its caves and plinth from which to watch its one great fight. And then, when it is over, when those who populate your life return to their curtained rooms and lie down without you, you are alone, you are quarry. * When the mayflies emerge it is in great numbers from lakes where they have lived in nymphal skins through many molts. At the last a downy skin is shed and what proofed them is gone. Above water there is nothing for them to feed on— they don't even look, except for each other. They form hurried swarms in that starving, sudden hour and mate fully. When it is finished it is said the expiring flies gather beneath boatlights or lampposts and die under them minutely, drifting down in a flock called snowfall. * Nothing wants to break, but this wanted to break, built for slaughter, open arches to climb through, lines of glassless squares above, elaborate pulleys raising the animals on platforms out of the passaged darkness. When one is the site of so much pain, one must pray to be abandoned. When abandonment is that much more—beauty and terror before every witness and suddenly you are not there.
Eliza Victoria 