Entry #15
I sat in the banyan grove, listening, just in case. Light was falling, the world was going blind.177 178 179 My cue for movement was the faint rustle I began to hear—a feathery fidgeting one could detect only out of long silence. The bats were stirring from their cave,180 telling me I should begin my walk back home.181
But as I climbed off the banyan’s gnarled branch, that is, its ghost tree, there he appeared. Bernardo Carpio, Diego Silang, Padre Pelaez—all the heroes of the past rising from the ashes. Or, better and infinitely wonderful, Padre Mariano Gomez, hallowed be his name, who baptized me in stealth (so my uncle says). It was my father—but it was also all of the men182 of my uncle’s stories. Dark, benevolent, and hunchbacked. This man was dressed in rags with a basket of rambutan in his hand.183 He was skulking to the ground—he crouched, startled. He was dressed as a woman. He did not speak.184
Of course I knew him as my father because of his crinkling brow, protruding upper lip, giant katsila nose, and my own eyes: bright, broad-lashed, and stupefied. He was the funeral figure in the portrait in my grandfather’s home.
He looked like me.
Except he wore a dress.
He, on the other hand, had no idea who I was.
I took a step forward, he took a step back. I looked back at the emerging, slow flurry of the bats, rising from behind us like ominous ashes. My father followed my gaze and looked with attention at the dark creatures.
The name came out of the lowering forest like a sigh of trees, a part of the day’s progress. As darkness comes, sounds gain precise trajections, geometries in space that I can trace, like compass points. For me, nature has a comforting orderliness in the dark. Birdcalls have their logic, insect wings move in reasonable hum. Nature’s purposes are clear when sight is gone. I understand that this is not true of most, who are scared by night’s secrets—except for this man, my father, whose glance without fear tested the flight of bats with responding radar.187
They hovered above us now, as if bidden by their name.
He now looked at me with the same thoughtful glance he gave to the night fliers. They had an awkward way of flying, these blind pilots—not from lack of skill but from habit, their sense of space’s immensity that they rightly claim for themselves. Reeling wings, like drunken birds, pointless rocking, zigzagging then “righting” themselves up—their bumbling aviation mimicked the trembling leaves, the rustling wind in the woods, a cunning shadow-like presence. They opened their mouths as if to scare us—a feral yawn that doubled as sonar scream. Then they flew off, leaving us to our thin radars of recognition, our infinitely weaker human ways of connection.
“Paniki,”188 189 190 responded my father.191 “My poor Bulag.”192
“No. Not Paniki. My name is Raymundo,” I said, the retort in his presence I’ve always wished to speak.193
The message of his image: he was alive.
I went after him, but he was gone. I ran back home, bats tracing my joy in dark reels, flying upside down like drunks. But when I reached the windows of the kumbento, and I saw my uncle’s dark figure, like a paniki himself, outlined in hunched fatigue, as if reading, I stopped. Would he believe me? And anyhow, what did it matter? It was this grave, nerve-wracked man who had taken me to his burdened heart—it was he who loved me like my father.
Tio U., I saw him dressed like Apoy Yaka, an old lady, he carried a basket of rambutan.
And what is your evidence that woman was he, my son?
Because he ran away when he heard my name.
Ay, bulag ka talaga!194 195 196
177 In reality, Raymundo was going blind: my understanding from his indifferent relatives, still living a stone’s throw from the Republic’s Memorial to Independence, in Kawit, is that as a young boy he could see well in the day but had a degenerative nightblindness, a debility now labeled retinitis pigmentosa. I empathize with his sense of loss, the symptoms of a possibly genetic ailment over which he has no control. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
178 First overt textual reference to blindness, apart from Uncle’s Admonition (“Tio U. angry. My eyes . . . ,” see Entry #6). One hazards the view that blindness at this stage may have been hysterical, and I don’t blame him. I can only make empathic guesses. Certainly, there are many things this youth might wish to be “blind” to: unrequited love, an absent father, a socially castrated uncle, a dead mother, and a grandfather from Jaca. The cases in which a hysteric’s fetish progresses from organic truth are myriad. The human body is not just a vessel, it is an accomplice (cf. Epithets XLIV). (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
179 Isn’t “the world was going blind” personification for dusk? (Trans. Query)
180 This is foreshadowing. In late 1897, after rebel successes in Cavite, the revolutionaries retreated in despair from the fresh onslaught of Spanish colonel Miguel Primo de Rivera and his redoubled forces. They found refuge in paniki caves, dark and sulfurous regions distressingly familiar to one among Aguinaldo’s men—the stoic, blind soldier Raymundo Mata. This camp was the famous Biak-na-Bato, last refuge of Emilio Aguinaldo’s troops in the First Phase of the Revolution—the war against Spain—and site of the first peace pact, with Spain. It was during this long, sad march that Raymundo received his general’s stripe. After Biak-na-Bato, the rebels took the money from the pact, settled in Hong Kong, and with the arrival of the Americans a year later renewed their rebellion, the Second Phase of the Revolution, only to confront the treachery of their American “friends”! This is how it came to be that Raymundo Mata wallowed at the end of his life in the American jails, lamenting his travails in these memoirs. Bastards! Americanos! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
181 In Raymundo’s memory, the rebels’ retreat to Biak-na-Bato was suffused with an atmospheric trail of bats—symbol of the darkness into which the rebels would descend after the (temporary) surrender of Aguinaldo’s troops to Spain, and the still darker, grim fate that awaited them in the next phase of revolution, against America. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
182 Raymundo nostalgically names a number of heroes for whom I have fond though spotty recall. Bernardo Carpio, the only man in the list who never lived, is a superhero in a significant, therefore unread, tale, a giant chained to a cave; the trembling in the cavern as he pushes at his chains explains why the country has volcanoes. Bonifacio liked him; Rizal alludes to him in his novels; geologists are not that into him. Diego Silang was an Ilocano rebel who terrorized the Spaniards, though his wife, Gabriela, of course, was the actual fighter. Padre Pelaez: saintly Archbishop of Manila who died among the ruins of the Cathedral during the 1863 earthquake (see also Entry #5). Padre Gomez [see also Entry #1]: family friend of the Matas. In the end, disturbingly clerical images indicate the boy was still his uncle’s nephew—conservative, Catholic, and devout. I can’t wait for him to turn rebel. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
183 Perhaps a dream. Consequent to the Masturbation Entry (#13), this scene might be viewed as displaced guilt from his joyful habit of jacking off. Or not. What comfort is there when heroes reveal their humanity in gross ways? A lot. The transvestite detail has intriguing psychoanalytic possibilities. As for erotic matters such as rambutan (hairy, vaguely pubic, a squamous aside) and bat-cave fetish (need I mention cavernous holes, and the freaky furry creatures disgorging from them?), I shall leave their psychic design to the reader’s imagination. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
184 Dr. Diwata Drake, I have one word for you. Quack! If I weren’t tied to i.v. tubes, with abasic despondency and a still undiagnosed lung problem, not to mention weird epidermal eruptions right now, like fish scales, on my arms, I’d be rushing to Kalamazoo to give you a piece of— (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
185 “—Paniki, sabi ko . . . etc.” Fruit bat is an approximate translation of one of the species known in the Philippines generically as paniki. Whether Raymundo uses the term as vocative, addressing his father as demonic apparition, or nominative, naming the actual bats, is ambiguous. In any case, flying vermin appearing with long-lost fathers is not a good sign. (Trans. Note)
186 Most probably the golden crown flying fox, Pteropus vampyrus, found only in the Philippines and once swarming over central and southern Luzon, in the days before concrete condominiums ruined its habitat and the view from the (also diminished) esteros. If I might add, “blind as a bat” is not scientific; bats can see, but it’s more convenient for them to navigate by sound because they’re weird. I had to learn all that in high school biology, when really, all I wanted was to play bulangkoy. Ah well, those were the days, how our youthful prisons become charmed memories. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
187 The use of the modern acronym radar [from radio detection and ranging] is an inspired translation from the antiquated Tagalog. (Trans. Note)
188 The text implies that this term paniki was a boyhood nickname of the hero. The state of the manuscript indicates many pages have been lost, and the scenes that began this name-calling are not told. (Trans. Note)
189 Aha! A telling reference to the hero’s nom de guerre. Raymundo was attached to fruit bats perhaps because of the “blind” creature’s metaphoric (or is it metonymic, this part of my education always confuses me, in the same way I’ve always mixed up Nashville with Memphis) relationship to the author’s degenerative eye disease. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
190 Names are the most arbitrary among the plots that frame us; simply responding to our “names” is an act of repression. What’s hidden and slips in response to the question, “who are you,” is intolerable: I have no idea, someone else gave it to me. The typical Filipino name—the ones that conjoin the Spanish with the American (e.g., Cherry-Pie Morena, Dimples de la Cruz)—inscribes old struggles in daily speech. But at least they’re funny. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C.)
191 This section, The Dream of the Bat and the Father, is the boy’s third hallucination. Another psychotic break, wrapped in historic tissue. It’s no surprise the boy was prone to visions, given his orphan troubles. That these spells of lunacy have a coherent literary quality is, to my mind, more disturbing. Perhaps it underlines for us the paralyzing fact that, above all, neurosis is word-bound, and it spooks me to think one day one will submit to the mind’s intolerable whim—when in dementia language becomes “a shuddering excretion of pustulant dreams” (cf. The Mürky Manifesto, tract written by renegade students of Mürk, led by the Colombian-Latvian translator/critic Pedro Ménårdsz and known collectively as The Mürky Mürks, expelled from Mürk’s Analytic Arboretum in Antibes in 1968 for a bizarre episode of mud throwing and an “ecstatic abandonment of science,” one of them even pinching me as he exited. The Ménårdszian minion left a ruby streak on my cheek, shaped like a soggy rhombus, which sometimes stings even now, a phantom palm). (Dr. Diwata Drake, Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C.)
192 As previously noted, Raymundo was fondly called Bulag, especially by his boyhood friends. His code-name in the revolution, though, was Paniki. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
193 This seems to be a Good Dream. As opposed to the Bad Dream, the Good Dream “names” (so to speak, but not really) traumas. The boy’s trauma seems to be that he is unknown to father, and vice versa. This kind of dream leaves you refreshed, wide awake, and unaccountably happy, as if your dilemma, by this “naming,” has been resolved. The Bad Dream, of course, is whatever makes you a mess. It’s true that on any day the Good Dream could become the Bad Dream, and vice versa. The problem with The Mürky Mürks, according to Mürk, in his “Letter to Ménårdsz” [Mürk’s Epistles No. 54], is that they believed language of any kind was a virtue, whereas, as we should know, it will always doublecross us. The reddish stain on my cheek, a welt of consciousness, traveled with me that entire summer, though on that day I, too, chased the Mürky Mürks out of the arboretum—faithful to my mentor, betrayer of my love. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Villefranche-sur-mer, France)
194 Chronologically, this entry seems to have occurred or been situated during vacation months (March through May) of 1885. A year later his uncle sent the chastened boy off to Manila, in anger over Raymundo’s alleged truant exploits in San Roque, wandering off to bat caves and forests when he should have been memorizing the litanies to Mary at the Latinidad. Thus ended the San Roque chapter in his life. (Trans. Note)
195 The issue is why? Why does this dream occur at this point in his life? He is undergoing puberty; he dreams of manhood; he exercises freedoms he has never indulged in before; he is sexually volatile, experimental, and confused. Various signs of repression fly about: a healthy, accepting homosexuality? chronic onanism? Or perhaps the bats (in this dream mere background) are in fact his real subject, the foreground of his reverie: i.e., putas, or mga babaing mababa ang lipad [low-flying women, for which bats are also metonyms]. The question remains: what was he doing in the banyan tree? The forest’s association with the father—a masked rebel, a skirted bandit, a wanderer in exile whispering secrets in his ear—comes off as ruse: Disguise. No alibi is an accident, so says the savant. Just as, on a national level, what erotic jouissance is encoded, nay, gleefully discharged, in the aggressive battle with the colonial master—masked here in the banal skirts of doomed romance, this melodrama between pére and fils? (Dr. Diwata Drake, New Orleans, Louisiana)
196 Oh. My. God. Dr. Diwata. My kidney’s going spastic, my knuckles are cracking. Kill me now with your speculative saecolorum, Dominus vobi-scum! You’re worse than the mumbo-jumbo of the friars! This is a heart-rending meeting with the boy’s long-lost father, a moment of affection, of familial reunion! Where’s your humanity, your sensitive side: you vampire, you black-hearted, malnourished—bat? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)