Alexis
On Sept. 1, 2009, 27-year-old film critic Alexis Tioseco and his film journalist girlfriend Nika Bohinc were brutally murdered by three men in their home along Times Street. A maid who had been hired the previous month had let the men in. Tioseco and Bohinc had just come in from dinner when they were shot. Nika was leaving for Slovenia the following day.
I met him by accident, in a bar. There was music playing. The walls were green. It was dark, and loud, and crowded. There were laughing writers in long orange skirts and ponytailed old men sneaking sips from silver flasks of whiskey they snuck out of their pockets.
I remember being half-drunk, of weaving around tables on the way to the bathroom, of discovering my table empty of the boy I had decided I was in love with (I decide I am in love quite often).
And so I sat alone and closed my eyes and when I opened them again, there was a boy sitting across from me, a boy with a Jewish nose and Japanese eyes, who smiled and shook my hand and behaved as if there was nothing particularly odd about sipping iced tea talking to strange girls about the state of Philippine cinema. I don’t remember what he said, or what I said, or if I said anything at all. I did not remember his name the next morning, only that I was glad to have someone there.
Two years later, I had a phone call from my Rogue magazine editor, who told me my column’s layout was done, that I should call Alexis Tioseco, and I understood this as I should call an Alexis Tioseco about my column’s layout. And so I called Alexis, and he explained, very kindly, that he was not in fact a layout artist, that he was a columnist himself, and that he had written the article a page after mine.
I remember him reassuring me that I was not in fact an idiot, that he would be happy to meet me anyway even if he wasn’t a layout artist, and then he asked me to coffee because I was a writer and he was a writer and that he suspected we had very much we could talk about. It was only when I met him two days later that I remembered a boy with Japanese eyes who talked about film at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night.
He had brought a book to the coffee shop – John Berger, I think – and he read aloud from it, right there, at the center table of a Starbucks in Tomas Morato where young girls in short skirts and flip flops giggled over photos in their mobile phones, and clumps of television producers rambled about ratings and the Kim Chiu-Gerald Anderson onscreen tandem.
He read and read, an entire chapter’s worth, and I suspect he would have read on to the very end if the coffee shop hadn’t closed. He wasn’t that good a reader, was Alexis, spoke in a monotone and would begin from the beginning whenever he made mistakes and all I wanted was to eat my Oreo cheesecake.
And this line, he said, listen to this line. And he read it out loud, and I felt that quick ripple of jealousy a writer gets when they recognize a perfectly-written sentence they know they can never write themselves.
He lived five minutes away, and he couldn’t cook and I never would and so we wasted money on risottos and panna cottas and chili burgers, trawled the length of Morato for new restaurants, and we would argue and he would read and I would pretend to listen and once in a while there would be that one glowing sentence that I would write down.
I’ll tell you what I remember about Alexis. I did not know him best, or longest, only that I knew him, and cannot believe that he is gone. We agreed on very few things – that the only real pizzas were cheese pizzas, that there is such a thing as true love, and that Everyman Library published the best hardbound books.
He was a film critic who refused to write about “Juno” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” who waxed poetic about Lav Diaz and Raya Martin, who had the greatest faith that if he pushed hard enough and wrote strongly enough, the public would rise in a body and applaud the work of Ishmael Bernal and Mike de Leon.
He believed that independence in cinema was not measured only by who spent the money. He believed the Viva Hot Babes could not act, and could never be convinced otherwise. He believed in relationships, in replying to messages and keeping promises, and was the sort who pulled out battered copies of much-loved books out of his bag as Christmas presents.
I remember one night, near midnight, when I found myself locked out of my apartment. I called Alexis, and did not have to beg when he offered his couch. I spent the night in front of his television. He put on some obscure film and I smiled in halfhearted appreciation five minutes before I fell asleep. I woke up to see him sitting across me, watching expectantly, and grinning when he saw I was awake.
Then he put on another film – he said this was something he felt I would enjoy – and I promptly fell asleep. And he did it again, three more times that night, film after film. He never gave up even when I said I was a plebian who had great love for “Jerry Maguire.”
That was who Alexis was. He would speak to six students with just as much passion as in a television show with a national audience. And then he would speak of his other love: about Nika, the girl he fell in love with in Slovenia. She was coming to Manila, he said, she was going to live here, for him, because he couldn’t leave. He said she was beautiful and intelligent and that she was the one girl in the world for him. I saw him less when she came, but I saw him happiest too.
I write this to share what I know of him, of this boy with the Jewish nose and Japanese eyes and the great love for moving pictures, the same way every writer and filmmaker who knew him is doing now, because I don’t want all that he was stolen away. I know that he was funny and kind, that Nika was bright and brave. There was only one sentence in his yearbook: Alexis Tioseco wishes to leave the world a better place than it was before he came. I know that I will miss them, that the world will miss them, and that even if the world is a better place for their having lived in it, it is a sadder, lonelier place now that they are gone.
This was the last time I saw them, two weeks ago. I needed a film, in a hurry, for a show I was producing. Alexis had picked up the films for me. It was 11 at night. Five minutes, he messaged me. And I went down to the street and Nika opened the car door and stepped out in jeans and glasses and both of them laughing at the sight I must have made, standing in the middle of the street rumpled and unshowered. Sleep, Nika said. I want copies of those, Alexis said. And then she went back into the car and grinned at Alexis and he grinned back at her and they waved goodbye and now I have copies of those films and I don’t know what to do because Alexis is dead and Nika is gone and I do not understand why.
