In the basement: Love and then some

(Editor’s Note: The following is a University of the Philippines Diliman alumna’s fictionalized memoir on the backbreaking, poignantly sweet last semester of 1964-65.)

It was supposed to be my last semester at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman.

I tried to remember this as I endured a miserably tortuous enrollment week—battling for a waiver of prerequisites, requesting for grades from

erratic professors, and rushing for class cards while fearing the section I wanted had already closed—hoping to get all the subjects that still had to be completed, which would finally allow me to say goodbye to UP with a Bachelor of Arts degree, a yearbook and a scintillating prospect in life.

But when the semester got underway, I ignored the syllabus and its assigned readings, going instead to the Humanities section of the main library and ransacking the new books.

I discovered—I was the first borrower, anyway—John Fowles’ “The Collector” and imagined I was Miranda Grey. I would have fallen for G.P., too.

I thrilled at Iris Murdoch’s “The Unicorn,” Colette’s “The Other One,” John Briane’s “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” and so on, till I realized I had lagged miserably in schoolwork.

The readings bored me. I labored over a paper on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins for two nights, submitted it without understanding a word I wrote and managed to get a 1.5.

Our class in French was very lively. Mademoiselle P. was a lay sister with a face that reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. I thrilled at the way she pronounced our names. We sang songs and recited poems by Verlaine, Rimbaud and Baudelaire.

That October and onward, I reveled in my being alone with more passion than before. I took lunch alone and went home alone, except occasionally when I would go around the campus with other English majors who—like me—took hanging out in the basement with passion.

Zealous desire

Seated at the Basement café those cold days in November, sipping hot brewed coffee and munching on crackling crisp chicharon, I felt for the first time a strong, zealous desire to write. I saw each of my friends as actually resembling characters I encountered in all the novels.

In the evening when I wrote in my notebook, the “I” began to take on a different image. I trekked the university grounds with a keener sense of isolation and loneliness and thought of literary men—Fyodor Dostoevsky, the epileptic; Jonathan Swift, the howling man; and Lord Byron, with his eternal gloom.

I thought of Hamlet’s melancholy (“The Tragedy of Hamlet,” William Shakespeare) and Werther’s sorrow (“The Sorrows of Young Werther,”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) and felt them to be mine, too.

I was on the European poets now—dazzling my eyes with the verses of Guillaume Apollinaire and Rainer Maria Rilke.

That semester, we were in the basement most of the time, not only to while away our time but to study as well, too lazy to walk to the library.

But mostly, we were there to wait for Dr. David Stone. We watched almost every day as he pushed open the screen door of the basement canteen, took a vacant table, opened his valise, took out paper and pen, and started writing.

I had a feeling it was a pose. Somebody would come up, say hello and they would be locked in conversation for the next three hours.

I watched him smile that terrific, enchanting smile and realized how utterly possible it was for me to be swept off my feet.

December came with a fluttering of leaves in the trees and random cold drizzles. The cold deepened in January. We wore sweaters and spent time drinking coffee at a basement corner table—waiting for classes, waiting to get hungry, waiting to go home, waiting for dusk. It was always beautiful at dusk.

We talked about movies and novels and writers and actors and disc jockeys and songs that knocked us out.

The basement at the Arts and Sciences was the hangout of the university’s committed intellectual and cultural elite—outspoken professors more radically inclined than the others and artists, phony or otherwise.

‘Bastion’ of rebellion?

The basement represented for them (for us, too?), in a vague, haphazard way, a brand of nonconformism, a lifestyle in the manner of the Left Bank or Greenwich Village beatniks: Self-consciously rebellious, conventionally nonconventional, hankering for freedom undefined and uncontrolled, defying the world.

And there they were—as we all were—amid the smell of brewed coffee and hamburger, bacon and hotdog sandwiches, romanticizing our images, calling to mind the atmosphere of the Lost Generation, the lonely hungry expatriates in Europe after the World War I, who were languishing souls, shocked and unbalanced and groping for some anchor in life: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, etc.

A group sang the Beatle’s “If I Fell.” A girl with long, straight hair tried to look and sound like Joan Baez, plucking the guitar and rendering a passable version of “Donna, Donna” and “All My Trials.”

Dr. Stone finally joined my table, one day when I was alone, after I had practically mooned over him for weeks.

“Hello,” he said and I felt the shivers. Him at my table seemed implausible.

He was not in the habit of seeking out people and joining them. He always took a vacant table, although seemingly welcoming of anyone who joined him.

Seeing the pair of pale blue eyes smiling down at me on a cold late February afternoon, I thought of Françoise Sagan’s Luc and Dominique. How I would have wanted us to be those characters!

I took the midterm examinations and barely passed. I thought of the numerous term papers to write and suffered terrible headaches. Once or twice, the feeling of isolation slipped away as I chanced upon old friends I had made long ago, when I could not decide on what course to take. I thought I had lost them forever.

I spent long hours with my few friends, talking about a lot of things, mostly about men. Men and love and loneliness: They were all somehow woven together.

The visiting American professor gave his finals in advance and was gone from the campus before examination week was over.

Two weeks later, amid frenzied preparations for clearances and graduation ceremonies—I had miraculously passed the semester—I received two postcards from Hawaii, one showing a breathtaking view of Waikiki beach, the other of the hotel garden.

It said: “Taking a breather from it all. Will proceed to the States in a few days. Much love to you. From us.”

Much love. How much it would have meant just a few weeks ago. Much love. Still I thought of him and saw, as though in a mist, the pale blue of the sea.

Geraldine C. Maayo (AB 1965; Masters in Public Administration, 1976; Doctor of Public Administration, 1983) has produced three collections of fiction: The Photographs and Other Stories (1981), A Quality of Sadness (1987), and The Boys in the Boarding house (2013). She recently retired from UP as Associate Professor in Industrial Relations.