The Adventures of Peter Valentine

November 15

If the novel is an entertainment, or some sort of an enjoyable puzzle that the reader is compelled to seek and read into completion, then, Valentine thought on the 15th day of his 30-day challenge, he should be writing his second act by now.
Or at least, he should be putting in new game pieces just to rock the boat, and throw his readers off the one-way track of the cat-and-mouse chase of the Luke-and-Valentine plotline. He needed a divertissement, a diversion of interest, and he thought of Pierre Vargas, a boy he also pursued a few months back, on his last trip to the Philippines. How did that story end again?
Together, Pierre and Valentine watched the 2017 Luca Guadagnino movie Call Me by Your Name, starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer, adapted from the 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman, screenplay by James Ivory. Valentine brought the combo Blu-ray and DVD discs from the US (and bought the book at the Texas airport for his flight reading), and had it shown to some Filipino friends who didn't have access to the film.
When he finally met Pierre in person, and after they spent a night together stargazing and waiting for the sunrise at the Jannah Glycel Beach House in Nueva Valencia, Guimaras, Valentine gave the book, which he had finished reading during his long flight from Baltimore to Dallas to Seoul to Manila to Pierre Vargas in Iloilo.
In truth, Pierre had no interest in reading the book, not after watching the movie with Valentine, but he wanted something from Valentine to remember him by.
To personalize the book, Peter Valentine wrote on the title page:
To P— V—
Call me also by your name.
Yours with much love,
P— V—.
Pierre was very pleased. They had talked about it—calling each other by each other's name—while they were spooning inside one sleeping bag laid on the soft white sand of the Nueva Valencia beach on a starry and cold October night.
Valentine had a strange, if creepy, attraction to Pierre. And if Pierre reciprocated it, Valentine knew it could grow into genuine romantic love.
But Pierre, a high school teacher following the footsteps of his parents, was ambiguous, perhaps confused, about his strong feelings for Valentine. It was as if the older man was the long missing part of him that, only now found, completes—no, completed—him.
There is a creepy story about their 16-year age difference. Like 16 years is a life span of an adolescent boy. And it is one story of real life oddity that is stranger than fiction. Or at least, weirder than anything that the writer Valentine can ever invent or imagine.
*
In June 1986, Valentine entered high school, and his first class ever in that school year was a Monday first period Physical Education, 7:00-8:00 a.m., made most unforgettable by his gorgeous P.E. teacher, Mr. Nestor del Castillo, who he greatly admired almost instantaneously.
Movie star gorgeous Mr. Nestor was a major crush ng bayan. He also played soccer, when everyone else in town was playing basketball and volleyball. In fact, nobody in the whole town ever played soccer. But when he was transferred to the school district two or three years earlier, Mr. Nestor brought with him his cleats and soccer ball, and taught some of the boys from his P.E. classes to play the game in the grassy field of a quadrangle behind the long Social Studies Building after school hours .
Young Valentine, more scholarly than athletic, only admired the muscular, fair skinned, and rather hairy mestizo teacher from afar. But because he was a most responsible student, and a consistent topnotcher in the theoretical part of the P.E. subject, he instantly became Mr. Nestor's teacher pet. He was assigned as the class monitor in P.E., and was always given exemptions from the quarterly exams because he always had perfect scores in the daily quizzes, and the long summative tests.
Their instant and mutual love for each other was undeniable. And because Valentine was also running for honors, their friendship, their mentor-mentee or whatever relationship there was between them, was always viewed with malice by the jealous and envious lot.
There wasn't a scandal about them in the sense of the sex scandals of the newer DepEd generations. But a lot of wild gossip and ugly talks also went around in those days. Neither Valentine nor Mr. Nestor, however, felt the urge to defend or explain themselves.
Maybe it didn't occur to Valentine at that time, or maybe he was just pretty successful in denying it then, but whatever gayness he has now may have some roots in his attraction to, his strong hormonal but "unnatural" crushing on, the beautiful and dashing Nestor del Castillo in soccer shorts, or in clean and crispy polo barong teacher's uniform.
In his sophomore year, Valentine's English teacher was a short, dark woman, not the prettiest in the school, not even in the English department where she belongs, but she was most kind, and had an open admiration for the young Valentine right from Day 1.
Valentine knew her from when he was just a freshman, because this old maid (sadly, 35 and unattached was considered spinsterhood back in the 1980s) was also the adviser of the school paper for which Valentine wrote as extra-curricular activity.
Valentine was the topnotcher in the editorial board recruitment exam the previous year, but because of seniority, he was just assigned as the news editor. Still, he had worked rather closely with Ms. Alma Vargas, who turned out to be his sophomore year class adviser, and English teacher, who had to defend before the Department Head the eye-popping 95% grade that she gave Valentine on the first quarter grading period of the school year.
"But you see," Ms. Vargas explained to her superior and co-teachers, "aside from excellence in my English class, Peter Valentine showed even more mastery of the English language when he topped again this year's school publication board exam. If I have to be fair, and to respect real writing talent, you can clearly see that I have no choice, but to name him Associate Editor even if he is just a sophomore. And you know what, if it's not too much, I would have even made him Editor-in-Chief!"