Consuelo teaching me

RAYMUND FERNANDEZ

Just for today, allow me a bit of self-indulgence. I am told that not everybody understands my writing, which is a somewhat polite way of saying, “Nobody understands it.” The statement does not bother me. The fact of being not understood derives from several reasons. It derives mostly from the fact of having many languages between us. Language selects. No writer is understood by all. The writer can only be understood by a few; And always, not fully. Every writer must accept that from the very beginning and live with it.

My mother taught me how to write. I hold a vivid memory of Consuelo Lozada-Fernandez handing me a pad of grade-school paper and a sharpened pencil. She puts the pencil in my right hand, between thumb and fingers. Her big hand engulfs mine. She guides the pencil and our right hands over the page. A firmness in her hand teaches my hand to be pliant, to momentarily surrender will, to accept guidance and teaching. This is where it starts.

The page has blue horizontal guidelines on it. We start from the left-topmost. We draw a diagonal line starting from here. The line goes leftwards as it goes down, crossing one line before it stops. Then we do another line starting from the exact point where we began the first. This line goes rightwards from that point. Finally, both our hands trace a horizontal line crossing the midpoint of the first line finding its way to the second where it stops — the letter A. I must do hundreds of it perfectly, filling half the pad with it. She checks my writing for quality in the course of the days ahead. The rest of the alphabet would come later, one letter at a time. It must have seemed like a tall mountain to climb. But it didn’t matter. We had the rest of eternity to do seemingly endless things where I grew up in my ancient hometown. Time moved ever so slowly.

It was easier for her to teach me to read. It was what she did all the time — Reader’s Digest, Mills and Boon, Perry Mason, Rex Stout, Graphics Magazine, Free Press, Bisaya Magazine — we had all of that, sometimes shared between neighbors, sometimes borrowed from the Dumanjug Municipal Library. My father, Venancio, had bound copies of DC comics. We had nothing much else to do but read and ride bicycles where I grew up.
She did not know it then, but Consuelo was also teaching me to draw, if drawing is, as I understand it, communicating by putting lines on paper.

Putting lines on paper is a wonderful thing, whether the lines mean letter or words, or a freehand rendering of Joe Palooka. I remember a huge warehouse across the street from where I grew up. Its wall was rusty metal made from flattened oil drums. There was a giant Joe Palooka drawn with white chalk on its wall. The Joe Palooka was most likely drawn by my cousin, Caesar. Joe Palooka may have been the first reason why I became a visual artist.

From time to time, I am asked: What are you more of, an artist or a writer? The question perplexes me. I do not understand why anyone should have to choose between the two. I never had to. I would rather be asked, why are you both? And then, I would immediately answer: My mother and my old hometown made me that way. It led me slowly, step by step, to become what I have become now. I do not have a vivid recollection of a point in my life when I actually decided to be an artist or writer. Where I grew up, the both were useful abilities. People always asked me to write and draw for them as I grew up through life. Going to school to learn how to do these seemed almost ludicrous at first. But there was more than a bit of self-will involved. It was never easy being a writer and an artist. One had to think all the time.

But I learned quite early in life how much pleasure can be derived from the simple act of writing the letter A on a piece of paper. Many years thereafter and I still cannot think of a more pleasurable thing to do: And now, besides that, the power to inflict the act of thinking on others, the power to challenge, to confuse, to perplex, as to annoy or make happy, to share with a few others that same singular pleasure deriving from the simple act of inscribing lines on the flat surface of a piece of paper. Consuelo taught me exactly how.