The Age of Umbrage

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Guadalupe de Leon has had a rather curious upbringing. A child of a broken marriage between a guy your parents warned you about and a stereotypical woman who is supposed to be smart but turns out to be an idiot when it comes to love, Guada is raised by her single mother Siony in their humble home until opportunity knocks on their door. Although a teacher by profession, Siony’s passion is in the culinary arts. When she accepts a catering job for a big company and the owner falls in love with her cooking, she receives a job offer to be the family’s cook in exchange for an irresistible compensation package and free lodging for her and her daughter. Reluctant at first, she eventually accepts for the sake of Guada and the opportunities the little girl will gain access to. Moving into Don Paquito’s palatial estate in the gated subdivision of Alhambra, Guada experiences the perks of a rich lifestyle despite not being wealthy herself, while her mother slaves away in the kitchen.

Jessica Zafra was a favorite author of mine as I navigated adolescence. She mostly wrote non-fiction, though. Anyone familiar with her work would know her for her acerbic tongue and sardonic wit, as though she were sarcasm personified. All of these are amplified by her flawless command of language. Whatever angst you had in life, she effectively verbalized for you in an unapologetic way, through highfalutin vocabulary that just scathed whatever issue she decided to tackle. In a way, Zafra is what I sort of aspired to be as a writer. I found her cool. Back then. Revisiting her work nowadays, though, just feels like I already outgrew her writing style.

Perhaps this has something to do with character evolution and maturity as a human being. The angst that predominated your high school days will still be present in your forties, but your reaction to it as well as your perspective do shift. The rants of a jaded adult presented in prose that is elegant yet sarcastic at the same time sound cool when you are a teenager. As a fully functional adult, though, it just feels like a ball of negative energy that you tend to avoid as you get older. The silver lining here is that you now totally understand where Zafra and all her vitriol are coming from.

The Age of Umbrage is too short at just 126 pages. The interesting variety of characters available could have easily afforded Zafra double or even triple the total number of pages, but it’s as if she got tired halfway through and just stopped writing altogether. It would have been fun to explore the lives of the Almagros more and then juxtapose those lives with that of Guada’s even more. This could have been a full-fledged novel instead of a novella, so one just couldn’t help but wonder what stopped her from developing the narrative into a longer novel, which she could’ve easily accomplished.

One theory is that maybe Zafra got so used to writing her non-fiction pieces, mostly critiques of society and politics in the Philippines, that she ended up with a material that resembles those? The Age of Umbrage, though just 126 pages short, is full of socially relevant themes, unfolding through a backdrop of historical events in the 80’s and 90’s. Some of the characters come across as fictional versions of actual historical figures, while actual ones are also mentioned from time to time. It’s weird but it is as though Guada’s storyline just served as a canvas that Zafra could paint on with her social commentary which ends up front and center.

Even then, The Age of Umbrage is a good coming-of-age tale, a peek into the lives of Manila’s old rich and how they operate in a society that venerates and hates them at the same time. Guada serves as the reader’s surrogate, navigating that specific demographic of society and providing an opportunity for some minor clashes between different social classes. This being a longer novel would have allowed the storyline to marinate and be served well-done. Unfortunately, what we get is half-baked word salad that squandered its potential by cutting the narrative abruptly when Guada’s journey had only just begun.