Entry #18

“Dagobert the Coward,

Or, Memoirs of a Student in Manila, 1886”228 229

“To hell with secret lists, jousts in the dark on my white horse—rescuing not maidens but my hot-coal hands, my feverish limbs.” So resolved Dagobert the Coward on his way to speak her name. The great nineteenth-century swordsman, Conde de Monte-Buntis, held by the hand the sweet prepubescent Lady K, damsel of fan, cowl, and comb,230 231 of paper flowers and leaden pen, of short legs descending from endless stairs, Manila mantilla in disorder, but no one dared notice (she was only fourteen). Dagobert looked downcast at her feet, step by step descending: embezzling desire. The Count held her in perpetuity, in impunity, in insolence.232 233 234 Ecce homo: he, Dagobert, would put an end to that.

But first: what were his weapons? Item: a subjunctive and morbid heart. Item: lots of adjectives. Item: allusions to Virgil and other classical sources. Items: loquacious, nose, dwarfishness.235 Item: a bag (more like a paper cone, a cardboard cornet) of walnuts.

Second: what were his obstructions? His own heart, his speech, his knowledge, his smallness, his history of powerful vacillation.

Thus Dagobert went to war, with a cardboard cone of words236—stupefied, tedious, fugitive, brooding, and anxious. His loyal horse, Atontado, gleamed brightly on the grass, a ruminant pillow. His young squire, Enojoso, a bit thick-skulled, had the monotonous habit of flicking his right shoulder like an epileptic, but Dagobert couldn’t afford any better. Knights with good posture were hard to find in modern times. Fugaces, his plural patrons, a pair of evil twins, had faces like Romans but no idea how to ride a horse; thus they paid Dagobert to undertake adventures while they sat safely at home, picking their teeth (but with what elan, what carious excavation!). Ah, as for the vile, the ventriloquial, the vain and vertical Meditabundo—arch-rival in horseplay, doppelganger from the Dolomites (via Kawit). Zozobra, the cackling witch, was perhaps less treacherous than Meditabundo, his old friend.

There was a time when Dagobert and Meditabundo237 bathed together happily in village streams, catching fireflies, egging each other by the riverbanks with furious concentration, with affection. Dagobert remembers how his tender eggs were so often cracked and broken because Meditabundo always cheated in the game. Meditabundo needed to win. He needed to be boss, even for an eggshell. The Tuktukan King.238 Dagobert, wise for his young years, understood his friend’s frailty, and his fingers shielded his crushed eggs239 in vain. Dagobert, though a coward, never cried.

Now as they set off, separate but simultaneous, on the way to Zozobra Castle, to vanquish the power of the Count and so free the pale menarchal maiden, Lady K, Dagobert was not so sure of Meditabundo’s goodwill. First of all, it was Meditabundo who had written that evil letter to his Uncle U. that took him away from Sir Ever-Ready and Sir Good,240 241 just as life was getting interesting. Second, here he was on a damned quest for a girl with short legs, in a city with dwarfish memory . . .242

228 “Si Dagoberto, Ang Duwag, o Memorias de un estudiante en Manila, 1886.” Short-short story written in some kind of frenzy: it has no ending and no apparent beginning. Worse, it is written in Espangalog, that collegiate mix of Spanish and Tagalog (freely interpreted here). (Trans. Note)

229 In the year 1886, Raymundo moved from San Roque, Cavite, to the Ateneo de Manila, sent down to the city by his uncle. An extant letter notes why (see Entry #16a). As this entry notes, the anonymous poison pen was most likely one of the Aguinaldo brothers, Crispulo or Miong [“the vain and vertical Meditabundo”], who wrote to Tio U. of Raymundo’s truancy, about his being “seen at the Botica, imbibing who knows what and shooting the crap with well-known wastrels.” Damned nosy busybodies these old heroes were. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)

230 Here, Raymundo shifts from Tagalog to Spanish: from del pañuelo y la peineta, de las flores de papel y la pluma de plomo, then back to nonsense Espangalog. I have endeavored to do it injustice (i.e., translate): binting binibini sa escalerang hagdang no hay hanggan . . . de pie de paa descender desear ¡o mi! de desfalcar . . . The last-mentioned verbs occur as if pilfered from a thesaurus, in alphabetical order. (Trans. Note)

231 Yet meaning is, in many ways, clear: this story is an abject tale of growing heterosexual, normative desire: the boy socialized into his world’s hierarchies. However, most delightful is a glossary of adjectives, a series of antonomasia—my favorite is the stupefied horse, Atontado. Perhaps a game in his Spanish grammar copybook, like his abecedary that begins the diary, Ms. Translator? (Dr. Diwata Drake, Florence, Italy)

232 Typical of Raymundo’s juvenilia: Latinate words overpower even his Tagalog. (Trans. Note)

233 Yes, I was overpowered once—it’s true, I loved him, he of that angelic frenzy, that ideological righteousness, my love. Pedro Ménårdsz, that Colombian-Latvian firebrand, prophet, leader of the eventual outcasts of Antibes, the Mürky Mürks. True, I was once on the side of his genius, on the day he took us hostage, in his thrall, during the Antibes Plenary. I did not expect my response; he had never even bothered to flatter me. I was just taken. For a moment, I believed he would relieve me of the knot, the burrowing borromean knot of my desire—in which my tripartite parts, Filipino, American, and Filipino American—might find solace in the Ménårdszian solution to identity, which had bounds, not just gaps. But it was not to be—I could see the fallacy in my love, the apostasy of answers. There was no way to pleat my parts into ironed and orderly design, like the Catholic uniforms of my childhood. And so we chased him out, chased him, chased him, chased him out of the garden of the Antibes Plenary, chased him out along with the rest of his fantastical heresiarchs, the Mürky Mürks of 1968. All I have is this throb in my cheek, where once his acolytes pinched me, as they fled. It still hurts. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Vence, France)

234 Uh. Huy! Psst! Psst! Dr. Diwata, Dr. Diwata, are you still there? Snap out of it. Huy! Psst! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)

235 The Spanish trio is: locuaz, nariz, pequeñiz. (Trans. Note)

236 Cucurucho de palabras. (Trans. Note)

237 Meditabundo, meaning “brooding,” seems to be conflated here with Miong, that is, Emilio Aguinaldo, later first president of the Republic, Raymundo’s old childhood friend by the Binakayan streams. Idoy, a.k.a. Candido Tria Tirona, is also a likely suspect, except that he is not known to be “brooding”; he was more of a bruiser. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)

238 Tuktukan, from Tagalog tuktok (to peck), the shameless game played with eggs and string, occurs again here in Raymundo’s story—a trope in the diary. Boys tied a string around their waist and an egg around the string’s other end. Making vulgar pelvic motions, hands off the string, boys “egged” each other until someone’s shell cracked. Boys on the sideline made bets on who would “crack” first. Prominent scene in Makamisa, Rizal’s alleged third novel, features a competitive game of tuktukan. The game is still popular in organized events, such as family reunions and corporate bonding parties. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)

239 Filipinos, in their ancient pastimes, had no Freudian hang-ups. Swiveling one’s crotch to crack someone’s “eggs,” visible play of virile humping as a form of leisure activity, became “obscene” with the arrival of the Spaniards. One good reason for the revolution against Spain was that the Spanish were “k.j.”: killjoy. One imagines an Eden of orgastic foreplay in prehispanic Philippines, a fabulous paradise of innocent phalluses in the world before Magellan. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)

240 You wish. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Patagonia, Argentina)

241 Agapito and Benigno, Raymundo’s pals from San Roque, soon to transfer like Raymundo to Manila. (Trans. Note)

242 Una ciudad que nunca duerme, que sueña como un duende [awkwardly literal: city that never sleeps, dreams like a goblin]. (Trans. Note)