Entry #16
“The Legend of Travestida”
Always the double, always the mirror197 198—I was in his clutches: the Man of No Return. He was my father, but he was also my mother; he was the womb and he was the grave.199 200 He wore a striped jacket with dutiful cravat, like that worn by Atenistas:201 a ready-made tie clipped to his collar, a vulgar insincerity. He looked man-made, not wrought by God. Even his trade was contrived: a fruit-seller in the wilds, where wild fruit held dominion. His jacket did not match his floral skirts, with their green-and-violet lace. Nobody was fooled. I spied him from a heart’s-width—the length of my sight; my uncle was right. I was blind. In that case, he fooled me. Maybe he was my father; maybe he was my mother. He spoke my name.
“Fruit Bat.”
But how do you know who I am?
You left me before I even learned to read, and now you mock my longing.202
Love is not what I want from you, but it is my right.
He did not stay. He left me with ten admonitions:203
“1. Beware of dogs. 2. In certain temperatures, watermelon is poisonous. 3. Love your neighbor as yourself; when you are moved to kill him, don’t. 4. Also, never pick a fight with printers, boat porters, and ladies. 5. Penetrate beyond illusion. 6. Never drink of the sap of the paraiso bark in the month of April. 7. Beware the seed of the paho fruit, fleshy and fulvous; the lanzones fruit, when burnt, acts as pesticide. 8. Whosoever takes up arms for love of country is as a babe suckling at his mother’s breast and moves in harmony with nature. Also, if you don’t look back at your past, you’re a pest. 9. August, the month of Caesar, is a good time to go to war. 10. Now I know why women wear skirts.”
He left, taking everything with him, even the rambutan in the basket. Over the course of years, these are the bandit el genio Jote’s reported acts of bravery, which I enumerate briefly to save lamp oil:204 disarming a Guardia Civil in Noveleta while said enemy was eating a baduya (flavored banana) in 1896; stealing a horse in the dead of night and serving it to troops in Naik by morning, leaving only a note (but this may be apocryphal); offering lunch to the wounded Supremo (going by in a hammock) near Limbon;205 206 helping a woman out of a ditch in Balara; acting as courier in multiple instances in the trench lines between San Mateo, near Manila, and the revolutionary forces in Cavite; picking juicy pakwan to offer troops exhausted by battle in Imus. In all these comings and goings, el genio Jote remained incognito yet appreciated, rumored and ineffable, and impossible to interview, such being his vaunted modesty, but most of all his slipperiness,207 208 his astonishing mystery. He also raised a ruck209 210—
197 Siempre doblando, siempre espejándose. An interesting switch to puerile Spanish, which seesaws through these early sections, at times in random scribbles, at others in packed passages with excess fat. (Trans. Note)
198 Does the writer mean “I” is always doubling and mirroring itself? Or does doblando [sic] refer to the Man of No Return? The Self’s sentence, it is true, is a dangling modifier. In any case, it is interesting that Raymundo recreates his father’s apparition in picaresque form, this time as a quixotic encounter starring a transvestite. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Manila, Philippines)
199 Oh who cares about your mambo-jargon, Dr. Diwata?! I liked best the Shakespearean allusion: “the earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;/what is her burying grave that is her womb” [Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.10-11]. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
200 Please explain the significance of Shakespeare? (Trans. Note)
201 Students at the Latinidad and his next school, the Ateneo, probably studied Shakespeare, you know, translated into Spanish, of course, hence the allusions! I just love these wordplays in the text, don’t you? Makes me think of my college classes with that demon teacher, Profesora Magdalena Rama. Aroint thee, witch! I still hear her condescending cackle in my dreams, most pronounced when I could not explicate in class the stupid significance of the pounding of the gates in Macbeth. It’s funny how abuse grows on you. Profesora Magdalena was my worst nightmare, with her silver bowl-cut of a Hamlet-wig—come to think of it, she had sunken cheeks with big dark eyes, too, she looked like a skull—but her enunciation was golden, a gliding stream: she spoke like the Holy Spirit, from the diaphragm. O Profesora Magdalena Rama, where art thou now? Dead! Most famous student of the Ateneo was, and still is, Dr. Jose Rizal—and it was downhill from there. Raymundo, after his serial truancy at Latinidad de Jose Basa, arrived at the Ateneo a full decade after Rizal. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
202 The text is garbled here, but the sentiment, as translated, is, I believe, faithful to its plaintive intent. (Trans. Note)
203 There are three known decalogues arising from the revolution: Andres Bonifacio’s; Emilio Jacinto’s; and Apolinario Mabini’s. This, el genio Jote’s Decalogue, is the fourth. The rebels liked counting in tens, like the god of Moses. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
204 This is perhaps figurative: Raymundo found it hard to see at night, though many witnesses, especially young women and cockpit gamblers, attest to his quite lively vision during the day. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
205 Raymundo refers to the revolution’s early days: cohorts of Miong, a.k.a Emilio Aguinaldo, Magdalo general of Kawit, raided the Manila leader Bonifacio’s camp in Limbon. Mga Hudas! Traitors! After the election fiasco of Tejeros Assembly, the men of Miong arrested the Supremo of the Katipunan for treason, among other lies. What do you expect of Caviteños! Philippine history has never recovered from this tragedy. Raymundo attests that his father heroically offered a guava to the bloodied Bonifacio, Supremo of the Katipunan, who was carried to trial in a duyan—a frail, swaying hammock! This moving incident, of el genio Jote meeting the Supremo, is like Veronica meeting Christ, except with a Guava instead of a Shroud, and it occurs in no other Filipino text. How nice that the son offers this evidence of his father’s patriotism. The reference to Limbon is confusing: if this were written before Raymundo moved to Manila to study at the Ateneo in June 1886, then this is a flashforward to the Magdalo raid in Limbon in April 1897 (eleven years later). This proves my suspicion that this narrative is not anachronistic but polychronistic, that is—proof of the bad food in Raymundo’s Bilibid jail cell when he was writing this under custody of American G.I.s! Not to mention the water torture he endured! Oh the inhumanity! Bastards! Americanos! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
206 By the way, the noble use of waterboarding in the G.I. jails was beautifully explained in an admiring description of an American hero of the Philippine-American war, the court-martialed Major Edward Glenn: “Major Glenn was highly commended by his superiors for his good work. The major was a relentless interrogator. As an aid with uncooperative officials, he used a method of duress called ‘the water cure.’ The uncooperative official was spread-eagled on his back and the end of the hose was run into his mouth. The other end of the hose was connected to a water faucet. Water was poured into the victim until he swelled up and thought his guts would burst.” The effusive chronicler goes on to say: “American Army surgeons later testified that the water cure was not lethal in itself, although they did admit the victim might expire from heart attack or sheer fright during the procedure.” Bastards! Americanos! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
207 “Slipperiness”: one more analytic cue. Let us note that Raymundo develops this scene of the father in two types of text. Here, as so-called romance, that is, fiction; and in previous, Entry #15, as diary—non-fiction. In diary form, the father is a Good Dream—equivalent to such benevolent padres [fathers] as Padre Gomez and Padre Pelaez—while in the romance, please note the rancor—his father is suspect, he is “slippery.” In fiction, the son gives way to bile: “You left me before I learned to read and now you mock my longing.” This is an abandoned boy’s riposte to a deadbeat dad. Very likely, truth is hiding in the tale. Significant, then, is Raymundo’s sophistication, his mature experiment with difference, with forms of narration. To unload the load on his mind. It’s as if, in this “multifarious” tome, Raymundo is aware of the curiously shapeshifting effects and uses of story, to recall Truth. (An important trope is his verb above: to read.) Awareness of multiple viewpoints within one person is unprecedented in revolutionary memoirs. Instead, what we have is dueling versions among different persons of the same dismal scenes. I would say that among the bloodiest battles in the history of revolution are those between dueling memories, in which each side imagines only his single stubborn version is true. However, Raymundo portrays here the awareness of the split being, through his doubled father—the duel that dwells within. (Dr. Diwata Drake, New Orleans, Louisiana)
208 Split? Dear Diwata—Raymundo’s father is not a banana. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
209 The text reads: Nag-alsa ng gu—. Raymundo does not finish the passage nor write legibly. I deduced the following fragment—nag-alsa ng gulo (he raised a ruckus). What do you think, Estrella? (Trans. Query)
210 I suggest nag-alsa ng gamit—or nag-alsa-balutan (packed his bags). Rebel refugees who scrambled out of Manila and into the towns of Cavite after the disastrous August 1896 battles in the capital were called mga alsa-balutan by the Caviteños. Although the phrase may as well be nag-alsa ng buhangin (blowing in the wind). (Estrella Espejo, ditto)