Entry #19
Number 15, Calle Caraballo, 1886243
If I were to retrace my steps down those cobbled lanes, sidestepping memory’s potholes, leaping over nostalgia’s waterlogged carriage ruts, I would find myself before a latticed window of capiz-shell ruin,244 245 not too different from others around it—a mix of elegance and atrophy, the kind of squalor that ennobles many recollections of students returning from Madrid to Manila. I was no foreign traveler, a mere provincial in the city, but I borrow from their passages my current nauseous sense of disorientation (or it could be the effect of this moldy pan de sal, damn the Guardia Civil, I mean, American G.I.s). Houses with thatched roofs and wooden buildings with metal railings stood together on that street. The beauty of buntis trellises, those steel commas of geometric window art punctuating this modern city’s spectral homes, framed kerosene images of studious labor and hid the wildlife within.
Señora Chula took good care of us. A hospitable widow from our province, always carrying a book of novenas and whispering to her gods, she had proud pectorals and a benevolent rump. Agapito showed me the hole in the wall, where we had a good view of the novelties of the widow of Noveleta. I believed stooping to look through it was dastardly and inconvenient, and checked it out only twice a day.246 247 248
I preferred La Jovencita Varonil (name withheld). She had a sweaty mustache and limber pelvis and liked to play tuktukan with the guys. It was her innocence I liked, the way she did not care if I bumped against her torso or crammed my palms against her haunches, the better to declare her victories. I would crack eggs with her forever, though she laughed at me, rightly so, because I was clumsy, pumping against her boyish hipbones, and I always preferred to lose, distracted by her shaking body. She climbed trees like a tarsier, swam like a dog, and ate like Agapito: who chewed with his gums showing. She was not sultry as much as cadaverous. Everything about her was disreputable (including her precocious hairy armpits), and so, doubly enchanting.
Oh Manila! That first boarding house on Calle Caraballo swarmed with swampish fevers and disgraceful tumors—all mine. The suddenness of my situation fed my rash passions, so I excuse myself—abruptly disgorged as I was, barely sixteen, from the provincial games of the all-boy’s schoolhouse in San Roque. Where before I thought mostly of the cockpit, now I thought only of the henhouse. So many women, in narrow proximity—at night, only a plywood-inch away! La Jovencita was only one among other, less alluring nieces of Señora Chula. The pious Anday was her grumpy maid. Flat-chested (but what of that? her modest aureoles like meteor dust on earth’s thin camisa provided mutable compass points, disarranging and disturbing, as she cleaned and grumbled all day long). Murmuring the rosary in the vulgate (the more vulgar the better). Huge bun on the head, thicker than guano buns on trees. Titay, the cross-eyed four-year-old, Anday’s bastard child. One day her prince will come. Above all—oh.
Agapito’s sister.
Lady K—who sometimes visited.
Silence is best among the unworthy.
My fellow inmates were indifferent scholars and creative bullies. If only Tio U., mild-mannered lover of Cervantes, knew he’d thrown me into this bestiary, worse than the blanket-tossers in Don Quixote! He would weep, he would rush me back home, in person.
Señora Chula’s son, “Leandro,”249 250 251 252 253 was a rake and reprobate in the mold of Roman centurions, but more stupid—he organized a riverbank picnic the week I arrived, and while I was trying to keep my footing in the clammy mud he pushed me in—in jest. He tried to drown me in the Pasig then had the gall to save me! From the magnificent bosomy widow Señora Chula he earned a mother’s embrace, and as for me, the nearly drowned weakling, she sent a look of pity mixed with scorn. The beasts around me laughed. “Leandro” was tall, broad-armed, muscular—the type women pretended not to stare at then whispered about when he was gone. (Some nasty neighbors lay the obscure paternity of tiny, humpbacked Titay at his feet, the brute.) In his presence women, even his cousins, had a simpering fatuity that was never lost on him: he treated them with a nasty joviality—a particularly masculine candor—and they playfully tapped their fans against his boorish chest, giggling at his insolence. He was four years older than I and two heads taller.
I hated him.
“Florencio” from Batangas was “Leandro’s” sidekick, capable, kind, but easily misled. He had a knack for memorizing but a measly conscience, as small as a rat’s. In private, when we were alone (we shared a room with weeping “Moises”), he treated my miseries with sympathy and asked me advice about Latin; but in company with “Leandro” he slouched like an oaf and beat me up. “Moises,” a new boy like me, was always away on the weekends, picked up by his knock-kneed, sentimental Chinese mother who could not bear to have her only son gone from home. He treated his weepy Mama with contempt, laughing at her bent-over, shuffling walk with his companions; he didn’t tell anyone that whenever she left, he cried. He was a storehouse of vulgarity and, stout from his mother’s endless noodles,254 255 256 was good with his elbows, cudgeling the small boys under “Leandro’s” watchful eye. “Moises” did not last long, and “Arcadio” took his place, another cretin, a future criminal with bad teeth.
Soon it happened that when they learned of my debility (my Botica Luciano eyeglasses were a giveaway) they’d lure me out at night, and I, the fool, was tricked. On the pretext of “gathering santol” or “catching fireflies” they would strand me in the middle of the dark street to be cursed by coachmen and left to die, prey to vehicular monsters, a blinkered ass. For them it was a game, blindman’s bluff. Someone would always rescue me from my terror as horses approached, just in the nick of time as carriages passed—usually my roommate “Florencio,” who would hold out his hand and guide me to the curb. With weeping gratitude I followed his lead, despite my anger and humiliation—but not before all of them had their fill of gagging on their knuckles, rolling on the cobbles with their evil glee.
Then there were their other victims, names too lamentable for recall, except for the soulful Agapito. For some reason I ended up their leader, which wasn’t much of a consolation. That house’s disturbing divide—devout women crossing themselves twenty times a day for the smallest reasons, contrasted against those demon louts—haunts me still. I rose with saints and ate with sinners, a miserable communion. Fortunately I mingled with the zoo only when school was over, the sunset shading our exhaustions. (Plus, “Leandro,” an overstaying scholar who finally got kicked out of school, was soon too tired from his job as printer’s apprentice at the Frenchman La Font’s to rough up anyone with usual valor.)
By the second term I found a place closer to the college, on Calle Magallanes, and, informing my uncle that location was the reason, I left that cursed house, with fond memories nevertheless of the view from my window of the river Pasig, the startling aroma, like fabulous squid, of women at their ablutions, and the drops of sweat on a feminine mustache, perpetual and livid, an oily gleam.
243 Located extramuros, outside the walled city (intramuros). Rizal’s boarding house, circa 1873, was a few houses down, a corner establishment against the Pasig River. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
244 Las ventanas de concha. Capiz shell was the preferred lattice material for Spanish-era windows, native and charming: translucent nacre squares in harlequinade or chessboard patterns. (Trans. Note)
245 My own heart’s bitterest memory is my return to my grandfather’s old home—by the riverbanks of Barugo—and I saw the house’s ancient wood, broad narra stairways, and, most of all, the sliding frames of its antique capiz-shell windows (with which I used to run over dead moths and beetles back and forth, back and forth on the ledges’ sliding frames, on those endless boring summer vacations)—I saw it gutted beyond remembering and replaced with glass jalousies and concrete: to Americanize! My mother, a winsome diva whose practicality was her unsuspected strength, slapped me and said—just be glad you have better plumbing. But Ma, can’t we have both—beauty and a bath!? The family’s past is vanished. Chilling essays of corrupt self-knowledge lie in the remains of ruined homes. Later in Raymundo’s memoirs, shell divers from the island of Capiz, after which the old-fashioned décor is named, appear briefly, a pair of patriotic mariners whose lives echo the romantic symbolism of the cast-off windows. See my monograph on their forgotten escapade: “Mermen of the Deep [Deeps of Filipino Oblivion, That is],” Provinces: Essays on the Dis-[Re]membered, 2–40. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
246 Can you please excise, Mimi C.? Should we foist on our young readers this unexpurgated view of [pornographic] heroes? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
247 More to the point, the unexpurgated view before our heroes, that is, the fine rump of Señora Chump. Oh, Estrella, must we be so prim? Why so proper now, after wading through his shitty episodes, masturbatory declensions, troubling hallucinations? Were our heroes immaculate conceptions? Did they not have eyes? Hands, senses, passions, well-oiled organs, wet dreams? Et cetera, et cetera. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Stratford-upon-Avon, England)
248 Not sure if I agree with either of you. Personally, peeping Toms creep me out. However, I am no divine expurgator, like Saint Luke or Saint Mark. I am only a translator and do my best to render faithfully the hero’s Word. (Trans. Note)
249 The writer uses quotation marks around names. Maybe Estrella knows their identities? (Trans. Query)
250 Voyeurs and felons! As a kid, I always hated bullies like them and never gave them valentines. I have no idea who these beasts in quotation marks are. I hope they died in the revolution. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
251 Interstitial characters such as “Leandro,” “Florencio,” and other quotation-mark cretins occur in various memoirs of the heroes. Once the war begins, these names disappear unless they become heroes (e.g., Miong, who becomes President Aguinaldo). Where did the quotation-mark characters go? Minor martyrs, obscure traitors, passive shopkeepers, wild gossips, brave wives, foolish girlfriends, and, hard to take, Filipino soldiers of the Guardia Civil shooting their own—these also populated the villages, towns and arrabales. The array of victims, victimizers, and kibitzers were all one after the revolution. This gamut had to pick up the pieces of the battered country when revolution failed. The origins of modern postcolonial governments perhaps lie in these names. It’s likely that we descend not from “heroes” but from these “beasts in quotation marks,” as Estrella calls them. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Jaca, Spain)
252 That’s okay for you to say, Miss Kalamazoo: I’m no descendant of beasts. You forget—it’s your kind, the whites, that killed the heroes! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
253 And it’s your kind, the deranged—oh, why am I even answering your email? (Dr. Diwata Drake, Jaca, Spain)
254 Long-lipe [sic] pancit: Raymundo uses English here; lone Saxon phrase in these Castilian sections. (Trans. Note)
255 Interesting pattern, Mimi C.: you re-translate the English into English. One deals with “native” terms in various ways. Re-Englishing is a structural corollary to Obvious-Footnoting and Annoying-Renaming.
Obvious-Footnoting: Ex. Nanay [footnoted as “the Tagalog equivalent of Mama”] or Sinigang [footnoted as “clear broth flavored with tamarind and ginger”]—as if Filipino readers never heard of their Nanay who keeps on making sinigang. Annoying-Renaming: ex. calling kalamansi “native lemon” or puto “native rice cake.” In turn, the reader is temped to declare, it’s a goddamned bibingka, you native morón! Academic notes expose a structure of colonial neurosis. They seem confused about their implied reader—the unknowing foreigner? that rare breed, the Filipino who reads footnotes? The automatic slip, of course, privileges the foreign reader, stand-in for the colonial Master. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Babil, Iraq)
256 Here’s one more structure of colonial neurosis for you, you hairy mongrel: Footnote-within-Footnote—[“hairy mongrel”: mestiza-balbon]! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)