Entry #24
December 1887 to March 1892
Into my rooms came Benigno, the wannabe maestro, his harassed nerves of a crab and his timid smile, I’ll always remember it. (Even laid out wounded and tortured in the dungeons of Bilibid, he turned to me with that same—.)326 327 A reunion with the gang from San Roque.328 He shook me out of bed where I was unknotting a double negative in a line by Calderon to no avail. I could barely manage to read. I was lethargic in those days, after the fiasco with K. No matter what I did, scribbling in my journal, reading Ovid, visiting the prosti—, I mean, going to church, I could not forget her.
Sometimes I felt like weeping like a child.
The party was at the Japanese place in Binondo. Everyone was there.
Idoy lorded over us like a bouncer, slapping everyone on the back as we came in, so that we all lurched into the room dizzy from his welcome. Boy, that cousin of mine has an arm. Tagawa, the Japanese kid with that cipher of a face—he welcomed us with churros and an impenetrable smile. My heart turned when I saw Agapito—how grown up he looks, in leather shoes. He’s developed a serious, troubled air. Might be the mustache, growing a la Juancho, le Français, Monsieur Cailles.
Agapito came up to me, I wondered if he had a message—but all he wanted to know was if my boarding house had a room.
Perfect timing, I said—come and be my roommate.
I needed the money.
But what I really wanted was to ask him about—his sister—.
I thought better of it. He never mentioned the vanished K. globetrotting toward Barcelona with her lucky fiancé. Agapito kept silent about her to me. Out of politeness. I was grateful. He’s a good man. I carried my melancholy with me, a gloomy wreath around my heart, but no one noticed.
I saw Santiago, that domineering bon vivant, ever present at all parties, with his glistening hair of Brillantina® grease. And of course Juancho the Frenchie came again with that glum guy—what’s his name—Ricarte? He’s not from Cavite but he hangs around, brooding like the Count of Monte Cristo. I saw the brothers Crispulo and Miong. I mean Kapitan Miong to you, on vacation from his duties. He’s a busy man, and it’s funny to think of those old days when we swam in the stream near his house in Binakayan and played tuktukan by the bat caves. He’s mayor of my hometown now, and when as he hugged me he secretly pinched me in the arm the way he used to do when we were ten, I felt this swell of pride that he once bullied me, and the first toast we all drank was to him. He insisted.
It was Agapito, ridiculous in his ill-fitting American suit as always, who brought up the subject. He had a copy of the pamphlet under his sleeves. I’d heard about the paper but had never seen it. All I had were my crumpled monthlies, El Mundo Ilustrado and La Ilustracion, my rented magazines, where I traced the mutant worlds of Europe, of globetrotting K.
I thought the famed pamphlet was a myth, and we all crowded around Agapito.
But Idoy—at a gesture from Crispulo, I noticed—told him to stop it—don’t go there, it was a party not a political assembly.
But Agapito called him a coward, which you do not do to Idoy.
A brawl ensued.
Agapito, already a bit tipsy, got the worse of it. Boy, that cousin of mine has an arm. Tagawa, the Japanese waiter, watched it all with implacable cheer as he handed out salty finger food, I mean chicken feet. Benigno, that sad crustacean—he charged stupidly into the melee, his twitchy limbs flailing in absurd intervention, and it was all I could do to drag him away. He’s a shrimp, and I’m blind, and in the end we crawled to a corner and watched everything happen while eating our fill of Tagawa’s chicken chicharon.329 330
I bore a corsage of misery, like a lash on my chest, but this affray, for some reason, lifted my spirits. I had no idea what it was about. Idoy and Crispulo had the last word and tore up the pamphlet in Agapito’s face.
That was the end of that.
I was walking home one afternoon along Magallanes when of all people I met my old Latin teacher, Father Gaspar. We had coffee.
—And you are progressing in your studies?
—Yes, Father.
—And your uncle, the priest, he is doing well?
—Yes, Father.
—And does he know you are going with that crowd?
—Which crowd? No, Father!
—Ah. You think we don’t hear about those things? The fight in Binondo at the Japanese Tagawa’s place.
—Oh, no, Father. Someone took me there. It was not—
—It’s a cult. The love of country. It’s a blasphemy unto God.
—Yes, Father.
—Love God above all. Avoid tangential divagations.
—Yes, Father.
—And what will you do next?
—I hope to study medicine. Or law. Or teach. Or maybe, I said shyly—maybe I’ll write books.
—Hmph. Stick to one, boy. You’re a daydreamer and a scatterbrain, but there’s hope for you. Look at this one.
—Who is this, Father?
He pointed his bony fingers at the grimy book on the table.
I hadn’t noticed the bundle he was carrying.
—Look at this one. An Ateneo boy! He studied to be a doctor but now—he’s a pamphleteer. A novelist! What will the world come to next? Lawyers will start pharmacies!
—Yes, Father.
—I read this from cover to cover. It makes me sick.
—Then maybe you should put it away, Father?
—No. I will give it to you. Keep it. Then throw it away to someone else.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was late for dinner, and I took his gift, running back to the boarding house before the kerosene lamps came on. Even as I sat there in the café, I was suspicious of Father Gaspar—no one throws away a book, even bad ones, in this blighted city.
Either you sell it or burn it.
And he must have taken the brawl in Binondo for something else. He was going a bit senile, Father Gaspar. In my last years at the college, I had begun to feel kinship with him, which was not a good thing. Students made fun of him, especially the Spanish boys, copying his scared, shuffling gait and the way he always bowed in unction before foreigners, even the young ones, and his manner with me mixed obsequiousness with affection, which annoyed and distressed me at the same time. But I think it’s precisely his pitiful authority that made me consider his image without scorn and to believe even pity was dishonor.
To pity him was like sorrowing over my own fate.
I didn’t touch his ratty book, oily and disheveled from use.331 332 For a nauseating novel, it had gone through a lot of thumbing! I was in a state of malaise, of contradictory ardor that made me lie in bed and do nothing. My days of passionate error were over, and I kept fondling her lone paper rose, now crumpled and dirty from much abuse, with self-loathing. Oh, I was a clown and a degenerate, a jackass shaking on my bed. I couldn’t stop myself, I committed all the sins of inertia, and then some. Sometimes, I wept.
When Benigno visited, as he always did, sniffing at the room’s disorder, concern palpable in his gentle eyes, I told him my suspicions about Father Gaspar, how I thought he was trying to frame me. Don’t be silly, Benigno said. I swear he was waiting for me on the street, staking out the boarding house! Frame you for what? With a book, I said. A gift. It must be for your graduation, Benigno said. Everyone knows you were his favorite, though no one knows why, you idle lump!
Yes, it was true, I was graduating, and perhaps that led me to even more dolorous dumps than I imagined it would. What to do now with my learning, my fine declensions and knowledge of the nasty novels about hunchbacked old Frenchmen? What to do with the riddles of La Rochefoucauld and the shrewdness of that dead Jesuit, the illuminating, humane and, to be honest, kind of wicked Fray Balthasar Gracían, artist of worldly wisdom?
If only I could ship off to Madrid like the rest of those lucky bastards, Filipinos with money to burn, become an ilustrado and shove it to the colonies! Imagine myself in Barcelona, in a frock coat with two beauties beside me, one an irresistible, but surly, gypsy, the other a moral floozy with a heart of some kind of insipid alloyed metal, and both polishing my mustache with their underskirts!
Oh God, that I was a cross-dressing bandit’s abandoned son and blind as a bat!
What I would do with a fine pedigree and good health, or even just some lands off Laguna de Bay plus twenty-twenty vision, not to mention brogues of Scottish heather, as they picture stout Alpine stompers in La Ilustración. Even Germany would be a haven, with its dank goats and strangely attired shepherds, and fat women with the red cheeks! And what about Brussels, with chocolates like lace and spittoons as large as fountains. Or London with its drafty libraries and Vienna of the second-rate beer, according to the damned wits of El Mundo Ilustrado? I would even take the sooty boats that transport one to America, paddling ridiculously along on their gigantic, musical wheels to the futuristic sideshows of their dull, mechanical shores.
And what of the sweet belles of Hong Kong, the tawdry charmers of Marseilles, and lisping socialites of far-off Seville? Worlds too vast for my outraged longing sat on my mind’s porch, like ravens. No wonder I lay in a stupor, burdened by their black, hungry, and beady eyes.333 334
And around Manila there were these forces of distemper, of ghoulish suspicion that darkened the streets, and no one would tell me exactly what was going on. My classmates at the Ateneo huddled in Satanic consort over papers distributed from God knows where, but the minute you approached they began talking about chess and boxing, and the tracts mysteriously disappeared.
Radicals in linen suits haunted the sermons of the priests.
Beware, beware!
Beware Masons, the friars yelled, their apoplectic spit burnishing sorry sodalists in the front pews. Masons are devils in our midst bloated with books under their coats, out to destroy our pleasure in the saints, including the fiestas, dancing, and theaters that prop up the love of God!
But who were they and who cared?
K. was gone.
She was sailing to Barcelona with her blasted love.
The last time I saw her, a desperate reunion—well, not really a reunion, I saw her by accident in the marketplace near Puente de España, and she looked into my eyes and went straight to a stand of imported pears, but I followed and pretended I could afford strange foreign fruit.
She said hello, as if surprised to see me, then the next thing I knew I was sobbing into her mantilla, and it was all I could do to get my schoolboy bowtie disentangled from her peineta as she said to me, there, there.
It was humiliating.
She treated me like her little brother’s friend, a nephew, a bloody bleating ungulate!
Then and there I realized—in her eyes I was a mere kid, a stupid goat. A bit neurotic, perhaps antic, but an immature lollipop nevertheless. Oh, my heart seethed with the sudden rancor of this revelation, and I fled the place, the apples, the fleshy pears and flashing pomegranates, racing across the bridge faster than all the carretela horses.335 336 337 I would prove to her, I thought, as I stumbled home along the cobbles. I’m graduating, then I’ll—I’ll—I’ll do what? I didn’t even have a ticket to get me back to Kawit, my uncle’s palay harvest had not come through, and I was stranded in Manila.
But one day, I vowed blindly, sidestepping housemaids above me emptying chamberpots, and gardeners watering orchids with the sulfurous surplus of the night’s ablutions—one day she will see. She did not know who I was. I would paint gladiators on gigantic canvases, I would create songs that would melt every single comb on her powdered head. I will write a book in which my countrymen would see themselves as if in a mirror, or at least like the reflection of a drunk in a wasted glass.
Then, as I said, I proceeded to sink into the squalor of my depravity, this morass of delinquent sloth that Benigno found me in. (Not to mention the laundresses, who bear my appalling linen away with glances that resemble hatred.) I remember that it was with this dread stink of self-pity—that gall that knows no fury like a life unlived—no matter if it was nobody’s fault, except my own—that I opened Father Gaspar’s book.
It was a bolt—a thunder bolt. A rain of bricks, a lightning zap. A pummeling of mountains, a heaving, violent storm at sea—a whiplash. A typhoon, an earthquake. The end of a world. And I was in ruins. It struck me dumb. It changed my life and the world was new when I was done. And when I raised myself from bed, two days later, I thought: it’s only a novel. If I ever met him, what would my life be? I lay back in bed. But what a novel! And I cursed him, the writer—what was his name—for doing what I hadn’t done, for putting my world into words before I even had the sense to know what that world was. That was his triumph—he’d laid out a trail, and all we had to do was follow in his wake. Even then, I already felt that bitter envy, the acid retch of the latecomer artist, the one who will always be under the influence, by mere chronology always slightly suspect, a borrower never lender be. After him, all Filipinos are tardy ingrates. What is the definition of art? Art is a reproach upon those who receive it. That was his curse upon all of us. I was weak, as if drugged. I realized: I hadn’t eaten in two days. Then I got out of bed and boiled barako for me.338 339 340 341 342
Later it was all the rage in the coffee shops, in the bazaars of Binondo. People did not even hide it—crowds of men, and not just students, not just boys, some women even, with their violent fans—gesticulating in public, throwing up their hands, putting up fists in debate. Put your knuckles where your mouth is. We were loud, obstreperous, heedless. We were literary critics. We were cantankerous: rude and raving. And no matter on which side you were, with the crown or the infidels, Spain or spoliarium, all of us, each one, seemed revitalized by spleen, hatched from the wombs of long, venomous silence.
And yes, suddenly a world opened up to me, after the novel, to which before I had been blind.
For instance, in my last days at the college, I heard a group of boys, young brats, some newly arrived from the provinces, say the talismanic name Maria Clara,343 and I joined in, casually, a senior with broader views. For, of course, like others, the romance had consumed me—especially I, vulnerable as you can imagine: the hero’s bitterness, his sarcasm in response to the woman’s lack of faith, the shallow alibis of her woeful confession as she professed engagement to another, to that pale monkey, that unggoy Linares (I saw him without any shred of doubt as that chess-playing fop in a passing carriage, on his way with her, even as I spoke, to Barcelona).
After all, who in his right mind believed that it was the sibilant priest with that skull-like face and obscene sigh who had changed her mind? It was a deft psychological trap, an empty chute engineered by the sly author, who knew I, the reader, would not be deceived. When at the end the books burned in the hero Crisostomo Ibarra’s library, that was the burning of his heart, nothing more. It was merely the death of Love. For it was she who had kept him in Laguna, anchored to his country—not the schoolhouse, not the ideals, not the lofty causes. Woman came before country; it was woman who betrayed him, I grieved. And when the ashes of the books settled on his fictional San Diego, I in Manila smelled fire, the acrid scratch of a heart’s phosphorous.
That was my first reading, a bit juvenile, and I could barely say the words right, in a rush as I was, as if blood were pumping out of my heart in rapid time with my nervous locution—I was so excited to speak. The callow boys at the Ateneo looked at me in awe (I thought), because, of course, they had never been in love.
It turns out, they were not talking about a book at all but a seedy hangout on Calle Soler in Santa Cruz.
I blush now at that memory, my dumb figure—shaking magus in Jesus’s temple: obviously a boy who had been dumped. At least those students didn’t know my tragedy had happened fourteen months ago. In retrospect, I suspect that when I left the courtyard the fresh-faced boys laughed hysterically behind my back.
Still, I rushed into other debates, for instance first with Benigno, that budding pedant, and then with Agapito, that vessel of passion, that toy of conviction, when he moved into my rooms.
Remembering Father Gaspar’s cryptic injunction—“throw it away to someone else,” so that in this manner the book traveled rapidly in those dark days of its first printing, now so nostalgically glorious, though then I had no clue that these were historic acts, the act of reading,344 345 346 347 or that the book would become such a collector’s item, or otherwise I would have wrapped it in parchment and sealed it for the highest bidder, what the hell, I only knew holding the book could very likely constitute a glorious crime—in short, I lent it to Benigno.
He was appalled by the novel’s blasphemy; he was shocked. He could barely read on after the philosopher’s harangue in Chapter XIV.
—But Benigno, I said, outraged by his hypocrisy, you’ve read seventy pages already!
He had clutched his rosaries and the scapulars around his neck and prayed the Ave Maria every time he came to a sinful passage. The Virgin heard many prayers from such critics. But I argued it was a reverent book, a book of true piety and devotion. Looking up from shredding his mother’s newly delivered batch of dried squid, Benigno stared at me as if I had had too much of his father’s lambanog.
—How so? Come on, Padre Damaso, he challenged, explique!
In his excitement Benigno did not notice the choice tentacles sticking out from his ridiculous incisors.
I exhibited three proofs: Chapter XVIII, Almas in Pena; Chapter XXXI, El Sermón; and, I nodded to the skeptical Benigno, the penultimate chapter, El Padre Dámaso Explica. In each clearly, I said, a true sense of religion in the writer contrasts against the corruption of the organized kind. The deranged mother Sisa’s devoutness reproaches the sacristan mayor’s cruelty, not God’s; the pomp and spectacle of the fiesta sermon is a sacrilege only to vanity, not to faith; and in the last, the pathetic speech of the adulterous priest Dámaso, we have the religious figure being all too human, not a scandal against God but a sketch of human weakness; and ergo, en fin and in summation, the book pictures not the fall of God but the fallibility of man.348 349 350
As I spoke, rather eloquently, I thought, and quite proud of my rhetorical semi-colons, Benigno cut up the mackerel and opened up his father’s haul of crabs with increasingly violent disagreement.
Agapito grunted.
—Bah, humbug! Agapito said. The book reveals to us what we all know but dare not speak: God is dead in the Philippine islands!
Benigno stopped in the middle of denuding a female crab’s womb of her ripe eggs.
I stared at Agapito’s luxurious mustache, now greasy with fish oil.
I realized then that Agapito was somehow changed—it wasn’t just his modish facial hair, his newfound, and a bit scary, intensity, or the surprising dogmatism of his pronouncement. There was an air about him—fleetingly so, mind you, I couldn’t quite pin it down—of a man in a rush, of a being about to go someplace else more important.
This is the boy who used to cower in the boarding house at the mere arrival of “Leandro,” who prayed to God to deliver him from the wrath of the local gangsters on Calle Caraballo! Now he spoke with a sense of destiny, with strange oracular certainty—with, I must add, an irrelevant temerity, as witness that scene at the Japanese bazaar in Binondo, in which it was his whipping out of a pamphlet, completely out of the blue and not quite appropriate to the occasion, that began the famous fight.
If it weren’t for the fact that he with Benigno had been a bona fide member of the Sodality of the Legion of Mary, way back at the Latinidad in San Roque, a devout group not even I, at the time not such a slouch in the ways of God, had been admitted to—
I would have sworn he’d become a Mason.
—It’s clear the author has found the true path of enlightenment not in religion but in the works of man. He’s an atheist, pure and simple, a materialist with a cause. We should all follow his example!
Benigno gasped, and the crab’s carapace clattered on the tin plate.
My God, I thought, Agapito was a Mason.
—He wrote the novel to free us from our bondage to superstition and show us the truth: how to correct our society. I mean, come on, didn’t you read the introduction?
—Maybe that’s all you read, Agapito, I sputtered. You can’t pulverize a novel to that base reduction. It’s not only about correcting society. What about the jokes, the ironical asides, the living grotesques of his human comedy? The beautiful absurdity of Doña Victorina and her crippled husband? The truthful laughter of his pen?
—Just what you said, Agapito rushed scornfully, they’re jokes. Of no importance. I found them boring myself. I admire the book’s ideas but not its style. Frankly, I wish he had done less burlesque.
—You may as well read a sermon then!
—I prefer to be informed, not indulged.
—So you prefer novels to be political catechism?
—I prefer that my country be saved.
It was a few days later—our small room still reeked of crab roe and sizzling squid and my brain hurt from the dregs of the lambanog—that Agapito returned from one of his soirees, wearing his leather shoes and his uncles’ undertaker clothes, his mustache smelling of his dinner as always. Just add perfume, and I would have guessed he was in love.
I whispered to him.
—Agapito!
—You still awake? Keep quiet. You’ll disturb the others.
I kept my voice down.
—Are you a Mason?
Silence.
—Why do you say that?
—You’re a Mason. You go to meetings late at night. You’re going to get caught. Your mother will die of a heart attack. Your father will kill you. Your uncles will tear out your liver.
—Sssh. Do you have a fever? Go to sleep.
I observed Agapito’s comings and goings with quiet foreboding. “Observed” of course is merely my figure of speech. It was maybe because I could not see at night—not much anyway (and it is worse now, as I wallow in this dank cavern of vermin and regret), shades of blackness, not even grays, layers of dim outlines that populated my insomnia—that I observed so keenly. Slight rustle of nipa, crackle of wood in the humid night, cockroach wings, scuttle of beetles. I could hear a Guardia Civil’s footsteps long before anyone noticed the rat was around. I had the ears of a bat. In daytime, I had little trouble: the eyeglasses ground for me at the Botica Luciano by Agapito’s uncles had the ugly functionality of our modern world. They worked. And though year by year they became heavier, and despite my knowledge of Cervantes and Alexandre Dumas I knew no one would love me, every day I blessed the miracles of science.
That at night sight shuts down for me, or at least what passes for sight in this limited world, only my closest friends appreciated—and of those, no one comprehended completely the extent of my darkness.
I never spoke of it.
The converse of this was that my other senses throw the most trivial of things into relief, rather than oblivion.
The exact moment of Agapito’s arrival on our street’s gravel, the place where he hid things late at night (a blunt object, like a jar; something light but cumbersome, rattling in a box; a small metallic object, perhaps a key), and the tired heavings of his lambanog breath, tobacco wind of his fibrous mustache, all occurred in frightening clarity but then regulated into predictable routine.
I must say I recall things now in detail, as if Agapito were snoring beside me, his Adam’s apple restless even in sleep, and to be honest I wish it were so: what would I not give to have Agapito loudly alive, disturbing my rest?
These registers were, of course, only some among many in the sensory jumble of those days, when I myself was sunk in insomniac panic. This is when it began, my descent into sleepless anxiety, which still occurs now, maybe with equal intensity but I just don’t notice, inured in this damp desperate cell to my dull dread. I imagine drawings and quarterings of different parts of my body, things lost, found, and snatched, faces rising from graves. In my waking dreams I keep imagining dead the people I loved, and I recognize it is only wishful thinking.
At that time, in the day books lulled me into sanity but at night I had to fend for myself.
Agapito’s mysterious movements provided respite and diversion. When finally he admitted his secret, it was no surprise, but still the frisson of discovery made my skin crawl.
Most of all, I was jealous.
There I was, believing I possessed a key with my knowledge of the secret and wandering novel, and Agapito had read it a whole year before me! Not only that—there was a second novel, darker, more rational and disturbing, and I, a misfit dreamer, had to hear about its plot second-hand, from Agapito. (My guess was that he, in turn, had also borrowed from some cynical savant his own offhand summations.) His group of friends, Agapito boasted, was aware of the most advanced things, the newest ideas from Europe!
I should meet them, he said.
Why had I not wondered, that night of Benigno’s seafood feast, how Agapito, too, had managed to get hold of the book when I had not lent it to him? I already understood I was not a rare convert into a select fraternity. I was only one among many with roused desire, stricken into fervor for one of a number of common reasons.
We were a proliferating fan club with abjectly identical persuasions—each of us shockingly unoriginal. Others preferred to call it love of country; but I was disappointed that my passon was so universal.
Worse, I was behind in the news.
In my romantic lethargy, I had missed other controversies, and Agapito divulged the author was incognito in Hong Kong, or maybe in the pocket of the Prussians, and some writers were even better than he, such as M. Calero, or L. O. Crame, my God, what polemicists!, whoever they were, we just did not have access to all the periodicals, and if I wanted to I could go to their meetings in Ermita, where Agapito and his cohorts discussed politics with a paralytic.
I was envious.
Agapito now had a sense of purpose, even though he spoke in that excitable voice, kind of like an aborted castrato, that did not go well with his mature mustache, and he still looked like a matchstick swimming in his uncles’ dark American suits. I imagined crowds of boys like him at their meetings, newly hatched fry agitating their awkward and supple, rather generic tails, flapping their fins in uncontrollable directions—whole schools of shrimp351 352 going the same watery road.
And I did go to one debate, in a well-appointed home by the river. I didn’t know anyone and was surprised some were—so old. They smoked cigarettes and drank chocolate, not liquor; it was merienda hour, with servants (the only women, though some wives and sisters appeared later) going in and out to heap our plates. After all the doughnuts and rice cakes,353 I was a bit drowsy, I admit.
But frankly I got bored.
They brought up names, events, and sequels to arguments I did not know the beginnings of, even addenda to incidents that happened in 1875! Please, I wanted to scream—it’s 1892, may we please leave the medieval age and get back to the modern world?
It seemed to me I shared nothing with these garrulous men except my country, and I rehearsed my refusal to Agapito: I’m very sorry, friend, I would have to tell him, but I could never become a Mason. You guys bore me to death.
Plus, they barely mentioned the books. One, clearly a learned man, maybe a lawyer, had the gall to say, with that smirk of the connoisseur when he’s coming up with a canard, that the second novel read like a rehash of the romances of Eugène Sue. I was outraged, but more so because I was a loser who had not yet read the book in question, something about masked jewelers and subversion (admittedly, a plot in Eugène Sue—but all the more reason to read it!).
The orator was a shriveled thing, wearing a shawl like a woman, and in a few years, I thought, people would have to carry him around like a child. His brain bulged from his receding hairline, like a dislodged piece of stone. Though from the silence it was clear his was not a general consensus, or even an understood one, no one had the courage to contradict him, partly because he spoke very good Spanish, I thought, but mainly because, well, he looked like a cripple.
But one man grew red.
He was the best dressed of them, as if going to a dance when all the rest came in plain clothes. He even had a handkerchief in his lapel that he kept folded, rigorously ironed, stiff like a chunk of armor.
—You have a right to your opinion,354 the man said, deeply flushing, but I must challenge you to a duel for your thoughts.
I admired this man, and weeks after I’d repeat his self-righteousness to myself, savoring the boldness of his exclamation.
Murmuring came from the crowd, some got up to shield the shrunken lawyer, and an aging gentleman laughed and patted the other man on his handkerchiefed lapel, with condescension.
That laughter dispelled the tense moment, then more puto came and everyone used the occasion to gorge on the cakes and ogle Orang, the skinny serving girl who, and I did not imagine it, kept brushing against me to pour chocolate for everyone else.
To be honest, if it weren’t for the serving girl Orang, who looked disturbingly like K, except darker and with something of a harelip, and who kept plying me with puto and bibingka as if I were about to be executed, the event would not have been memorable.
She was a spindly thing, but wild, with an amorous invention that, I must confess, at first scared me. I saw her off and on weeks after.
The detritus of my political debut.
She was infinitely more satisfying.
And now that I have reached this filthy topic, I will confess that my experience, not meager but, let’s say, discontinuous, had always been of the paying kind, furtive and stinky. (Around ten centavos the first time, on Calle Caraballo with Anday’s nasty cousin, Milagros the unmiraculous,355 visiting from Tayabas; she jerked me like a chocolate-churner, a damned insensate batidor, and I thought then it was always supposed to hurt, like being dragged on pumice. The third encounter, with a hag near the sewers of the Elcano pawnshop El Conquistador, was not such a conquest, but by that time I had learned the places where women kind of squeak, in another manner of speaking, and I would have finished all right, too, if not for the prayers of contrition in advance from whispering Benigno, next in line, his holy ejaculations at the door distracting my premature ones.)
For me, a blind boy in dark places, these acts were full of sounds (slaps and apathetic grunts), smells (rancid adobo made of withered pork, always perversely sweet), touch (lumpy legs like slabs of chorizo stuffed into veiny webbed sacs; breasts of different shapes and sizes, sometimes on the same woman; pubic hair like dried bihon; scaly stomachs; eel-like spines; gobs of gooey fat like rehashed miki), and lastly taste (myrrh, gold, and what the heaven is that frankincense?!).
But only Orang’s body did I see.
She was smooth, chocolate-skinned, and it was a marvel above all to see her belly button, that childish whorl the like of which will not appear again on another body. I had never seen a person up so close, in the light, and she let me do anything I wanted. What most moved me is that she offered to me openly those secrets of her young body—with a sort of vacuity, yes, a mental imbecility, and she certainly was not untouched, with a puerile looseness that might translate, later on, into that cackling vulgarity of certain insatiable wise women, but at the time, to me, her lewdness was sacerdotal, a mystical pact with an unworthy beast, and I, a dumb bat with no future, could only be grateful.
Orang, I’m grateful still.
Between and after (young Orang and I drifted apart, having nothing in common but mortal sin), I dallied in other pursuits while I awaited destiny’s interruptions. I took a job at a printer’s place to bide the time before my uncle’s palay harvest. An obedient nephew despite my faults, I had asked him advice about my future. The retired old priest had said: come home and rest, hijo, then decide what to do with your life. If you want to study at Santo Tomas, good; if you want to join me in retirement on the farm, all the better.
Alas, he nixed my hopes for Europe: for my own good, he said.
He was conservative to the end.
Long after the Cavite Mutiny, as I have said, my uncle had relinquished the public life to settle down on the farm with his father, the raving ex-soldier. My grandfather Don Raymundo Mata Eibarrazeta was now a hundred years old, who knows—nagging relic of a damned past, or so say the propagandists. He lurched and rumbled through the planting season, tearing up rice seedlings in his careless way, then he wandered into peasants’ hovels when it rained, addressing them with the familiar tu in his ridiculous speech, or so I imagined.
Townspeople laughed at the enormous Basque behind his back, so friends report. No one had the conscience to imagine he was a bit tender in the brain, in his enlarged head. Instead, they whispered in nasty gulps: it served him right to go blind from the ravages of “that other cholera,”356 by which God had demolished the old officers of the infested Cavite fort. Chismosas and malditas!
However, it’s true: my grandfather was not just sick, as far as I could tell from the gaps in my uncle’s letters, delicately evasive about the man’s genetic lapses. He was also a kinetic, thriving waste of a man—full of gasps and furors in his sightless frenzy as he wandered the farm in fluent idiocy, ranting at the world in the words of gypsies rambling down Europe’s Pyrenees.
Hard to ignore, and obviously a burden.
As for my uncle, on a less grand scale, changing the topic: he had arthritis and bouts of rheumatism, poor soul. He could do with some help. I knew I should return home. Instead, I wrote to say I would visit him before going on to more study at Santo Tomas, though I had no idea what I wanted to be.
While I waited for my ticket home, he referred me to “Leandro,” of all people, my old landlady Señora Chula’s son, now a married man with inaccurate memories of our past. My uncle hoped “Leandro” could get me a job and “put [me] to good use, away from collegiate ungulates.”357 358 359 360 361
As a mark of goodwill, “Leandro” secured me a temporary position as a printer’s assistant at the Frenchman La Font’s, a sooty bodega outside the walls, between Calles Madrid and Barcelona. I wept to think that these street signs would be my lone simulation of travel, the closest I would get to the life of K.
It was the gesture of a kinsman, a fellow Caviteño. I professed thanks to “Leandro” and reflected duly on the ironies of life. For one thing, the old bully of our youthful hostel had become a sentimentalist, full of unwarranted nostalgia and stuck with countless brats of his own whose mere existence, I suspected with pity, constituted my ample revenge.
In any case, it suited me, the printer’s work: slogging with ink’s innards, the mechanical grease of types, and the constant revelations of the haphazard life of words—you missed one letter and changed the world (not to mention your paycheck), and the irate client demanded a refund of the wedding invitations, because instead of marrying a postman she was allying with a ram.362 363 It still burns me that for this unwitting witticism the otherwise congenial Señor La Font docked me a whole real.
One day I received the telegram I had been waiting for.
Tio U. told me he was expecting me home, and he enclosed the ticket.
My life in Manila was over, and despite certain garish aspects of the walled city, I fell into a fever, sweats, and dejection. Suddenly, although it was not news, I felt a desperate sense of loss: to think of returning to creeky Kawit, beloved as it was, while all portents pointed to an earthquake in the city, and everyone else was packing off to thrilling adventures (even timid Benigno was awaiting a new life, his first post as a maestro de niños, after having passed his exams), and my nervous fancy, I was not even twenty years old, had risen to this intolerable pitch, and everything—a rotting store sign, the smell of batshit, Orang’s rump, the implausibly gaudy sunsets of Bagumbayan—seemed made just for my trembling, so that I mourned the sight of everything I saw, as if the city would crumble when I was gone.
I was like a man with cancer: my impending departure struck me extravagantly as a death knell.
It turns out I had the cholera.
I spent my last days in Manila vomiting my guts out in a wrenching farewell. The doctor pronounced my form “mild” and proceeded to bleed me to death. It is the vanity of youth to despair that life is short and the comfort of age to hope it is so. I wrote out garish deathbed slogans into a trembling notebook.
However, much to my surprise, I got better.
In the meantime, Agapito my roommate seemed more agitated than ever, and I must say I began to hate him, his bustling clarity and secret life, all his obscure ambitions that were falling into place.
He was preoccupied, ecstatic.
The magical glow of a man of purpose has something obscene about it, especially from the vantage of a sick observer with poison in his bowels. When he came in one day, eyes wide, in tears, distraught like a puppy just whiplashed, I had it in my heart to laugh at him.
Until he told me the news.
All this while he had been preparing for a momentous event.
I couldn’t believe it.
The Writer himself was arriving.
No, the Writer had arrived—yes, he, the Novelist from Heidelberg, from Barcelona, wherever the heck he had been studying to be an optician, philosophico-ethnologician, ophthalmologian—whatever. Who cares what else he had done? Nothing was of consequence but the books, and to be honest Agapito’s extraneous information kind of irritated me. He had been on a boat in Hong Kong on the way to the islands all along. He was going to set up a gymnasium and a botanical garden along the banks of Laguna de Bay, and if all else failed he would set up a colony of gentleman farmers, somewhere in the jungles of the British Indies. Bla bla bla. Boring. He went straight to Calamba to visit his blind mother. He wore elegant European attire, spoke Latin with priests and English to strangers, and he visited putas only once a month. He was a saint. He was tall, muscular, and comely, with porcelain cheeks, just like Crisostomo Ibarra.
So Agapito blabbed, unable to keep from boasting about his knowledge even though he obviously carried bad news, and I was annoyed, waiting with envy, for the critical matter of his information.
And yes, now the truth could be told.
He was in Manila, in our midst, not even ten blocks away!
The fact itself warranted a public declaration of miraculous joy.
I would give up my small intestines to see him, except that this damned epidemic had battered them to a pulp.
I would give up my kidneys, my left lung!
Agapito revealed with pride how he and his friends had held a party. The Writer was the guest of honor. They offered a toast. He gave a speech. I could have kicked myself if my knees weren’t already as limp as withered zacate—I could have been there! Instead I had been busy divesting Orang of her breeches in one of those many sordid afternoons at Fonda Iris in Paco Dilao! Oh, what a calamity, a black misfortune—God had punished me for not becoming a Mason!
But this was not the news he had to tell. Agapito had stopped looking like an injured owl, but at this point, his face turned white as if he had suddenly remembered a ghost he had locked away in a drawer. And he ran to the closet where I knew he kept his secrets in a trunk covered with his photography equipment: the jar of ink; the box with the rattling skull (stolen, he confessed later, from Paang Bundok by an acolyte); a quotidian quill. All his devil’s instruments were intact. I was surprised to be suddenly face to face with his paraphernalia, especially the skull.
I knew he had hidden away some treasures, but I had no idea he was such a ghoul.
—I’ll have to find a way to get rid of them, he muttered. They’re useless, useless, useless, now that he is gone!
—Come on, Agapito: what happened?
I looked away from the craven craw, I mean the thing of death.
—He’s gone, he declared dramatically. They arrested him.
The words sank in, but in the way you eat into raw tamarind—with the sourness at bay and then a bitterness, and in the throat an occult sense of pain.
—Is he dead?
—Not yet, said Agapito. He’s been deported to Dapitan. On the island of Zamboanga.
—So they haven’t buried him in Paang Bundok,364 I said.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
We spent the afternoon trying to find a way to get rid of the skull, which I walked about handling like a bucket. We ended up pulverizing it with a ladle. Surprisingly, it crumbled easily, like a losing egg in a game of tuktukan.
And all throughout this grisly operation, all I could think was: of all the darned luck.
I have an abysmal soul, full of mold where angels should sit. In these dire times I could think only of myself. The Writer had been right there all along, in a room on Azcarraga just a kalesa ride away. I could have touched his hand. And now they had thrown him all the way to Zamboanga, to be adored by infidels. What rotten luck. I felt my bowels rise again, a damned fluttering in my gorge. Always a latecomer. History keeps laving my behind, I thought mournfully—I mean, history keeps leaving me behind, as once more I waddled off to wash my country’s sorrows off my sorry bum365 366
326 Flashforwards begin to occur in the narrative, brief eruptions, portending a future too sad to delve into fully. (Trans. Note)
327 Sssh, Mimi C. Do not disturb. Raymundo has begun to describe scenes of katipuneros in action, gathering in secret meetings. Any amateur sleuth of Philippine history can decipher the following figures: the mustached Frenchman from Cavite, Juan Cailles (turned out to be a traitor, in the American phase—hah!—but at first he fought for the right side); Santiago Alvarez, future memoirist; Artemio Ricarte, the General Who Never Surrendered and Escaped to Japan. Best of all, the diary expands our knowledge of unsung heroes: Benigno Santi, one of the feared, holy millenarians escaped to the hills to confound the Americans, jailed in Bilibid with Raymundo in 1902; and Agapito Conchu, the saintly photographer’s assistant whose name is now lost in an anonymous collective noun, the Trece Martires of Cavite. Etc. etc. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
328 I don’t know, Estrella. Seems more like some birthday party to me, a “blowout,” not a secret revolutionary gathering. (Trans. Note)
329 Chicharon, delicately fried pork rind, is my favorite snack. Chicharon bulaklak—porkrind flowers—delicately fried pork intestines, are paradise. In fact, if you look into my heart’s chamber, you will probably find a conical circle of diseased arteries, a viscera-portrait of Dante’s Hell winding its way like a chokehold of birthday memories around my honest muscle. I’m glad to note my modern solidarity with the katipuneros: we even like the same junk food. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
330 Sssh, Estrella! Do not disturb! Let us read in quiet. You are right. Momentous times are coming up, and it is up to us, careful readers, to give Raymundo Mata the space—to carve out his reader’s mindful attention. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Katmandu, Nepal)
331 I love the smell of old books, but— (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
332 Sssh! (Trans. Note) (Dr. Diwata Drake, Katmandu, Nepal)
333 The illusions of Manila’s late nineteenth-century bourgeois were packed with inverse Baudelarian spleen: a kind of enraged louse-itch to gain access to the divine through exoticisms of place. Reciprocal diaspora of desire. The trade of textual wares is a trade of fetishes. Baudelaire Orientalized desire while the bourgeois of Manila Europeanized it, so that a symbolist-opiate Old-World squalor drenches old Manila’s dreams as a faux-Asia crawls in Charles Baude— (Dr. Diwata Drake, Paris, France)
334 Sssh! Do not disturb! (Estrella Espejo, ditto) (Trans. Note)
335 Oh no you don’t, Estrella. Sssh! (Trans. Note)
336 I cannot help it. The clatter of Quiapo echoes with Raymundo’s heartbreak in my sordid memory; eternally, Raymundo’s carretela horses expel their dung. When I was sixteen, the best and worst place to look for history books, novels, and atlases was the chaos around España—God, I wouldn’t even dare touch the fruit in the stalls—pocked with gnats and ancient flies! How many days did I spend scouring the stalls beyond the Bridge for dog-eared secondhand titles, Penguin carcasses, Picador corpses—the smell of horseshoes in the spines, the dust of worms on dust cov— (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
337 Ssh, Estrella! (Dr. Diwata Drake, Katmandu, Nepal)
338 Was it the Noli Me Tangere? (Trans. Note)
339 It may or may not be the Noli Me Tangere. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Havana, Cuba)
340 The secretly distributed, newly published novel Noli Me Tangere arrived via Hong Kong from the presses of Berlin in 1887 where the exhausted and penniless Rizal privately published the book with borrowed money. I don’t know about you, but it is impossible to imagine the novelty of that book. To me, the Noli’s meaning has vanished completely, and not just from the abuses of overreading—the friar-hatred is sawdust, the romance with Maria Clara is more irrelevant than a pairless slipper. And so I envy Raymundo Mata. And anyone who read that book with original passion. But then again, I envy even my younger self—the one who had read Karamazov for the first time, that fervent nihilist, my suicidal self, oddly full of life. I admit that I think with a pang of those times when I was sixteen and wandering the book stalls for my next fantastic find, not rebellious nor secret as the Noli, but still the next book was a possible thrill. And in this way, distant as I am from him, I imagine Raymundo reading a book. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
341 Ahem. Estrella. Now that you are done with your reverie and your shallow, unreliable understanding of this incurable masterpiece—allow us to read on! (Trans. Note)
342 Ditto. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Havana, Cuba)
343 Aha! So it was the Noli Me Tangere! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
344 It was a group mesmerism of an insane order, the reading of the Noli in 1887. Reading as hypnotism, a séance of a thing-that-was-not-dead-nor-absent therefore not resurrected nor unpresent, a raising of a thing-already-there. Noli me tangere—touch me not, as of a trauma, a hurt—was a magical imperative, impossible to resist, and a password to the country’s unconscious. Yes, it is true, as the savant says: it is the world of words that creates the world of things, and the nation is alas a mere text-temple. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Amherst, Massachusetts)
345 The samizdat nature of the distribution of the Noli—the tense secrecy of its reading—is untold. Historians agree on the Noli’s influence on Bonifacio (we’ve pointed out the Supremo’s fond reconstruction of a Fili episode in his first war effort), but the silent, awestruck chain of Noli readings, like a mass catenation of inconsummate arousal, is unglossed. I mean, the episode cannot compare at all to the long chain of names in the early eighties on the waiting list of the British Council in Manila for The Name of the Rose—but even that trivia has merited an essay! The act of reading as the single, most volatile revolutionary act does not occur in song or ode, and the image of a reader appears only once in a minor painting by Luna, master of the bourgeois still life. Whereas it seems to me akin to nothing that I’ve heard of, not even to the still-night readings of, say, The Gulag Archipelago—for the Soviet trauma has a distinctly morbid cast, being Russian, whereas the arrival of the Noli illuminates an almost naïve wonder—how a united solitude of reading created the portrait of a nation. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
346 The “united solitude” occurred mainly among the reading classes, but this does not lessen the power of the fantasy of nationhood: it underlines it. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Paris, France)
347 Sssh! (Trans. Note)
348 The Rizal novels contain the repertory of the nation’s Imaginary: consider it an aviary, a zoo of the country’s self-inventions—the Images that constitute that which we read ourselves to be. The writer Rizal most of all invented the repertoire of what the nation-coming-into-being hates and what it loves—the pea-fowl of Self-Deception; the mourning dove of Romantic Error; the lame duck of Pathetic Impotence; the Atheist grass-owl; and a whole slew of raptors—buzzards and buitres—in their cages of Concupiscence and Greed. True—the bestiary of Images contains also dysrecognitions: it is also possible that the nation was invented by the writer’s delusions. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Amherst, Massachusetts)
349 Oh, alligator of Analysis: shut up. Let Raymundo speak! (Trans. Note)
350 Ohoh, Ms. Translator: why so pikon at this moment, getting mad at your elders. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
351 Okay, okay, I’ll let the memoirist speak for himself, but may I say what a wonder it is to smell bagoong in the annals of revol— (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
352 Sssh! His point of view requires attention, I’m constantly footnoting in my head—how many monographs are buried in one turn of his phrases—and yet it’s not the history that demands silence—it’s the voice of the individual, not the hero—it dissuades analysis— (Dr. Diwata Drake, Trieste, Italy)
353 But first let me make just a few important notes on language: Churros y bibingka—throughout the writer uses indigenous nouns for various foodtsuffs, such as rice cakes (bibingka, puto, etc.), noodles (miki, sotanghon, bihon, etc.), and wine (tuba, lambanog, basi, etc.), food and fruit being the least translatable nouns in this material world, sorry, proof of either of food’s irreducible essence or my laziness. As the text proceeds I retain them all and won’t explain any after this note. (Trans. Note)
354 Just to let you know, then I’ll shut up. The red-faced man spoke Tagalog. The original goes: “May karapatan ho kayo sa inyong unawa, dijo el hombre . . .” (Trans. Note)
355 Milagros que no fue milagrosa. A running paronomasia, especially with names, continues in the text. (Trans. Note)
356 La otra cholera: syphilis. An outbreak of venereal disease in the late 1800s was a matter of concern especially in the Spanish arsenals and military forts. (Trans. Note)
357 “Fuera de los cabrones en su colegio.” The uncle penned various comments on the young rebels of Manila, all of which now lie in ash, it seems. (Trans. Note)
358 Most reliable about historical Narrative are its gaps. No one much accounts for the thoughts of rebels’ families. We understand that Doña Teodora Alonso, mother of Rizal, deplored her son’s “irreligious’”views and would have been happy to see him retract them. She disapproved of his extra-marital relationship with the Irish orphan, Josephine Bracken. Her son Paciano joined the revolution and two of her daughters were members of the Katipunan. But I have yet to read what devout Teodora Alonso thought of the Revolution. From the documents that remain, for all we know every single Filipino went off to raise that flag with the loving help of his family. It is likely that many had divided thoughts: conservatism is often the mark of mothers. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Trece Martires, Cavite)
359 Are you suggesting, you blonde apostate, that the mother of the hero, thus Mother of the Revolution, might not have been for the war? What paucity of heart and insight! Of course everyone was for the war! Of course everyone wanted to beat the Spaniards and raise the flag of Philippine independence! Why else did we not keep fighting when—up till when again did we keep fighting? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
360 After the military disasters in Manila, and the brief glories in Cavite, the heroes retreated to Biak-na-Bato in November 1897—diminished in arms, in fighting men, and even in the regard of certain towns (remember the citizens of places such as Tanza who sided with the Spaniards; remember also the hundreds of Filipino Guardia Civil foot soldiers who remained under the Spanish flag; remember Filipinos who hid and rescued their Spanish priests; and how about the provinces that did not join the war?; etc. etc.). It makes sense that the Narrative ignores these gaps, as an author might downplay episodes that do not propel his themes. We construct history from desire. This is not novel. We prefer not to know that the war was a battle for people’s hearts as much as a revolution against the colonial order; we prefer to ignore that the people’s hearts were part of that order. But to acknowledge it perhaps puts the act in perspective and defines the scale of rebel struggle. It highlights that heroism you cherish. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Trece Martires, Cavite)
361 Please, Estrella and Diwata, can’t we just read? His personal account is filling in, as you call them, the gaps—can’t we just read? (Trans. Note)
362 In the text, by the way, it’s clear that the young apprentice created a disastrous hybrid of cartero (mailman) with carnero (billy sheep), so suffering the consequences. (Trans. Note)
363 Sssh! (Estrella Espejo, ditto) (Dr. Diwata Drake, Trece Martires, Cavite)
364 Now called La Loma. Raymundo prophetically refers to Rizal’s preferred burial place, a deathbed request rather monumentally ignored. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
365 This dorsal view, unpunctuated, abruptly ends what I consider the second volume of the quartet of the hero’s memorias. Who knows what scenes were shaved and shorn, as the sound-mad hero might say? And as the latter papers, though a bit disheveled, continue to weave a skein of detail and at times achieve a winsome alchemical design, if I say so myself, I suggest silence in the margins where possible. Please avoid irrelevant discussion. (Trans. Note)
366 Speak for yourself. When your heart is in the right place, nothing is irrelevant! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)