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the deaths and births page. Though the paper’s website had run an erratum, blaming an intern for accidentally running Crispin’s from their stock of prepared obituaries, you could almost hear the self-satisfied chuckles swooping in on the westerly tradewinds. I didn’t knowhow Crispin had taken it, so I asked if he’d had a good flight. And what had got him all fired up. Crispin smiled at me brightly. “Death,” he said, “in Manila. I apparently have nothing more to lose.”
    That was the second-to-the-last time I saw him.
    Then silence too soon for one whose most pernicious enemy was silence.
    If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river’s murky waves. This book therefore shoulders the weighty onus of relocating a man’s lost life and explores the possible temptations that death will always present. The facts, shattered, are gathered, for your deliberation, like a broken mirror whose final piece has been forced into place.
    —Miguel Syjuco, en route to Manila, December 1, 2002
     
    * Natalia Diaz, “Filipino Footnote,”
The New York Times
, May 6, 2002.
    † Carla Lengellé, “Les guérilleros de Paris: de Hô Chi Minh à Pol Pot,”
Le Monde
, July 22, 2002.
    ‡ Anton Esteban, “Grand Central Terminus,”
The Village Voice
, August 15, 2002.
    * Lewis Jones, “The Salvador of Philippine Literature,”
The Guardian
, September 21, 1990.
    † Crispin Salvador,
Autoplagiarist
(Manila: Passepartout Publishing, 1994).
    *
Lupang Pula
(Manila: People’s Press, 1968).
    *
The Enlightened
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1965).
    * The story is renowned as the first fiction published by a Filipino in the magazine since Carlos Bulosan’s “The End of War” in the September 2, 1944, issue. Marcel Avellaneda called “Matador” “over-earnest faux Ernest” and “a chapter edited judiciously from
The Sun Also Rises.
”
    *
Jour
,
Night
,
Vida
, and
Amore
(New York: Grove Press, 1977–1981).
    †
My Philippine Islands
(with 80 color plates)
(New York: Macmillan, 1980).
    ‡
Phili-Where?
(London: Faber and Faber, 1982).
    §
Because of You
(New York: Random House, 1987).
    * Dingdong Changco, Jr., sued for libel. Salvador famously told the court: “Whatever truths you find in my fiction are only universal ones.” The book was banned in the Philippines after only 928 copies were sold nationally.
    † Interview by Clinton Palanca,
The Paris Review
, winter 1991.
    ‡
Tao (People)
(Manila: Passepartout Publishing, 1988).
    §
Filipiniana
(Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1990).
    ||
Scholarly Plunder
(Manila: Ars Poetika, 1981).
    *
Manila Noir
(Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1990).
    †
The Bloody Sea
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1992).
    ‡
Kapatid
,
QC Nights
, and
Ay Naku!
(Manila: Adarna House, 1987–1990).
    * Crispin Salvador,
All the News the Papers Are Afraid to Print
(Manila: Passepartout Publishing, 1993).

1
    A battered wooden chest in the bedroom, its inlay shedding, its key finally found in a locked desk drawer. Inside: A recent diary (orange suede cover, hand-burnished a smooth caramel [inside: translations, riddles, jokes, poems, notes, other]). First editions (
Autoplagiarist
,
Red Earth
,
The Collected Fictions
,
The Enlightened
, et cetera). A dilapidated overnight suitcase (white Bakelite handle; stickers from hotels long shuttered [the lock is forced open with a table knife: the scent of pencil shavings and binding glue, a sheaf of photographs {slouching at the edges}, his sister’s childhood diaries held together by a crumbling rubber band, pregnant manila envelopes {transcripts, newspaper clippings, red-marked drafts of stories, official documents }, a canvas portfolio {charcoal, graphite, ink sketches }, a battered set of Russian nesting