Entry #25
March (1896?)
I got the telegram from Miong when I arrived home from work at the Diario. Yes, reader, I was still in Manila. As I prepared to set off for Kawit, my bags packed and heart not so whole, the cholera quarantine in the provinces against those in the city sent us all back into its bowels. I had to return, then I stayed. I found a different boarding house, this time in the arrabales, in the shadows of the mansions of Anloague. With my friends dispersed to different occupations, some in the provinces, some to Europe, my life lapsed into tedious rhythm. I don’t know why I kept putting off the university: as I said, I was in a funk. Months passed, and the ships to Cavite came and left: I did not return.
Drudgery in the printing shop was all I could do, and it suited my moribund ways. And anyway, as my uncle says, always trying to make me feel better, of what use are wisdom and scholarly habits when all they get one are the garrote and banditry in Mount Buntis? My uncle’s advice is steeped in the gall of the past, like a teabag. His letters overflow with the gloom of the future. I daresay he’s right.367 Stay with “Leandro,” he says, as long as you want. Requiescat. And in the meantime: check out if you can send me free copies of the Diario once in a while.
He has a news fetish, my uncle.
I settled into my fallow years—that interregnum in Manila when I was not mind or matter, just a working lout in a colonial grind. It was not entirely unpleasant. I barely thought of my past, the vestiges of my childhood, and even of my education—all vanished like bubbles.368 I was a dead shrimp floating in the vapor of sinigang broth, with that semblance of the blush of life.
It was a relief.
I heard Agapito was still everywhere in Manila, busy compromising himself, but I never saw him. Like me, he’d taken lodgings elsewhere as his needs changed and funds decreased. Benigno regularly corresponded: he was doing well back home, teaching the catechism that passes for education in our blighted lands. He believes in it all, good old Sod. of the Virgin. Soon I heard that fine maestro de niños had a niño of his own, God bless the simple life, if you can get it. Up till now, when I think of poor Benigno—. I wonder what will become of his child. Here’s to hope, though I wouldn’t count on it.369 370
“Leandro” was kind enough to put in a good word for me at his boss’s other enterprise, as I said, at the Diario de Manila. A bunch of sullen workhorses kept me busy there. They matched my anomie. Yes, that neurotic printer Polonio, God rest his miserable soul, was among them, and Figura the alcoholic inker and Letra the tragic typesetter and a number of others whose names I have worked hard to forget and continue to muffle here in convenient sophomoric guises, just in case. Who knows, maybe none of the actual names they gave me were real anyway—all of them fictions to keep someone like me at bay.
It was hard to make friends among that tight-lipped crowd at the Diario—they ate lunch together and talked only among themselves, being all from Tondo while I was the lone Caviteño. Plus they hated my friend “Leandro.” It’s true that “Leandro” came and went with suspicious freedom, clearly a sycophant and snoop who did not have the guile to hide his purposes, but that should not have been reason to hate me, an innocent bystander in the subsequent mess. Apart from that, in the beginning I was still weak from cholera thus a bit addled in the brain. I still don’t believe I became entirely well. What impresses me now is the irony of it all—if they only knew then, now that history reveals its bitter sense of humor, I was on their side, for heaven’s sake!
As I said, I received the telegram from Miong when I got home from work. He was arriving the next day to stay with me at my boarding house. It’s always the case that the countryman in the city must accommodate those arriving from the provinces, no matter the state of your rooms.
Filipino hospitality is a curse.
My new rooms were, to say the least, not luxurious, out by the stinking bodegas near the back of the Bay. I was one of the last of our group from the Latinidad of San Roque to remain in Manila, and I don’t believe Miong would have had much to do with me otherwise, so separated had we become—he had gone up in the world, a full mayor, and I was a lowly apprentice, not progressing much, I have to say, at the printing press, just barely above the newsboys (and demoted to newsboy whenever I messed up, which was often in my blind state).
So I perceived in his telegram a note of desperation.
Still, I was honored. Even as kids we had called him munting kapitan.371 Now all of his wishes had come true, while I was barely functional at night, though quite cheerful in the day, especially after a cup of basi.
I met him at the pier, and strangely enough I felt this weird love at the sight of Kapitan Miong. Don Emilio Aguinaldo to you. No, I was not drunk. And no, I am no invert, bless their ravaged souls, as a number of girls in the melancholy hovels of Calle Iris372 373 will tell you, witnesses of my rash and generous exploits on their moody (also cockroach-ridden) mats. But the figure of Miong is the figure of my childhood: his is the face of my past.
I must admit, it’s not a gorgeous glass.
Miong has narrow eyes, they’re too close together, like bad neighbors. Not much of a forehead, with pointy ears, a bit ratlike. His face is pocked by smallpox, or is it beriberi? In later years, astride his horse and brandishing the magic sword he’d captured from a Spanish general early in the war, bearing that tragic brooding look that appears on all conquerors, he looked like a much better specimen of himself. But even Miong admits to a lifelong inferiority for being the runt of his family’s litter (plus, a maid dropped him on his head when he was three, you know, and in addition there was that fall he never recovered from during the mutiny of Cavite; anyway my point is his head always looked a bit—squashed).
But seeing him at the pier, I felt this overflow of sentiment, there in the breeze of the Bay, with the unshod grass merchants374 375 hauling out their wares, which smelled of my hometown—the earth of the provinces. From the bales of the zacateros, I smelled the rainwater hash of my uncle’s palay fields crawling with leechblood and beetlewings, damp with the humors of home.
Fresh, moist, and gritty.
The mud of the provinces lies in the gorges of Manila’s horses, and the aroma of horseshit is only the reverberation of provincial green. In truth I could not tell if it was the sight of Miong or the smell of shit that made me homesick, but I felt like throwing up, my guts still raw, sensitive to the city’s sodden air.
Miong, in a neatly pressed barong and linen pants, looked strangely expectant and disappointed at the same time. He stood at the dock with his belongings, a petite petate376 377 378 379 380 tied in an expert bundle around a cloth suitcase, next to his faithful servant Rufino, my distant cousin.
Miong already wore that mournful glimmer that I recognized from our childhood by the Binakayan waters: a kind of meditative ill humor that made all who were less aggrieved throw in their lots with him, just in case.
It was an odd charm he had, the ability to make everyone else fall in with his temper’s whims, as if they could for sure right the wrongs against him.
I felt again my boyhood concern over the cloud about his face.
—Bulag! At last!, he growled.
He greeted me with that childhood name, which no one had called me in eleven years. For no good reason it sounded like an endearment, albeit the familial kind: a nasty affection.
—What is it? What happened?, I said.
He took me aside and spoke in a whisper.
—Bulag, can you believe—that pilot over there—that starving old fisherman. Acts like the bastard of a Spanish priest, like those sons of devils I knew in Letran. He does not know who I am—a gobernadorcillo of Cavite. Didn’t he see my cane, with the insignia of a kapitan? Treats me like a servant.
—What did he do?
—He made me move my bags when I got on the boat—told me to take my mat and shove it. Rufino had to carry everything on his lap all the way to the shore.
—But maybe you were blocking the ladder, blocking other people’s way in?
—Bah, they’ll see. One of these days, they’ll know who I am. Make sure you get his name. I will report him. He can’t get away with this. I know the owner of that ship.
—Sure, Miong. Sure.
Old Rufino Mago, son of a farmhand of my grandfather, embraced me in the way Miong failed to do. Town rumor had it that Rufino was descended from criminal Mexican sailors who had jumped ship on a trip from Acapulco. He was a Chabacano ruffian whose strange pidgin Spanish endeared him to no one. Now old and gnarly, he held me close to him in a peasant hug, a provincial warmth I missed but could not wait to wriggle out of.
—Ah, hijo de puto! E tu un buta como paniqui ya!
Ah, son of a bitch—or rice cake? And I bet still blind as a bat!
Or something like that.
How could you not hug the old man back?
Rufino and I went off to see the surly pilot.
One could see from the pilot’s bulging arms that he had worked at this trade from childhood—a growling master of Manila’s shoals, a raw talent at the oars. His face was red and wrinkly from life in the open air, and he grumbled about the weather, which portended rain, while Rufino paid their fare for the banca. The cranky pilot, probably a Batangueño, settled at half a real, plus so much for the bags. All that fussing over some kusing.
I always turn away from scenes of haggling, embarrassed especially to argue over the skills of men upon whose talents our lives depend. What’s your name, I mumbled. Betong, he said. Betong Rivera, from Bai.381
Our duty done, we left him.
Soon enough, as our charred old Charon had predicted, it began to rain.
Did you tell him I know his boss?, Kapitan Miong barked.
We nodded, lying.
Settled in the kalesa, Miong directed us exactly how to arrange his bags behind the horses, Rufino and I soaking in the wind. Miong had the knack of a born leader, I always admired it. He compelled action while he remained idle—and dry—and we obeyed everything he said. The pilot Betong gave us a good fare, Mang Rufino reported in the wind, spoken in reproof of his master, I thought, who sat stiff, erect and unresponding, as we got into the kalesa, and the driver shook the horses, and we drove off.
I asked Miong what took him to Manila, but he put his finger to his lips and asked instead about the different arrabales—in which direction was Trozo, Tondo, and Binondo, as well as Meisic and Santa Mesa, as if he were here on a tour of Manila’s suburbs and had never studied right in its center, at San Juan de Letran. Come to think of it, he had barely been at Letran before he had dropped out to become a comerciante,382 so maybe he was not feigning but genuinely wanted to know. We went by the coast, and the rain made the Malecon even moodier and the walls of Intramuros creepier, but once inside the gates I perked up.
I showed him the stones of the Ateneo, and the majesty of the Palacio, then my old boarding house on Magallanes, that tragic site of adolescent romance, the exact, mortifying details of which I mercifully kept from my old friend (who could have cared less anyway—he’s always been pragmatic, impatient with fantasies that were not his). Miong was impressed by the statues and the gardens but like every visitor to Manila he said it smelled.
Rufino, on the other hand, soaked it all up, including the vapor, his mouth open. Down through the Puente de España into the Escolta and its lace-like lamps in the distance, I couldn’t help share the old servant’s awe, as we passed the colored paper lights and macabre made-up faces of bold European women in the shops. Manila always moves me if I am in the right frame of mind. The rain, just as suddenly as it had begun, stopped—jerky masculine clime.383
Now a romantic gauze filled the city, and the sun tippled the skies into mauve. The Bay fell behind us, drunk on its glamor. There where my dashed heart had upset the fruitsellers of Quinta; there where the warehouses of Chinese trade spilled onto nasty bars, such as that of Tagawa, the agreeable Japanese, with its dim cellars suited to heartfelt fistfights; out by the flimsy cascos of the Pasig’s bloated cheeks, blinkered witnesses through the centuries of eternal Manila’s trite routines—I understood how every city had the capacity for novelty if only you looked at it through foolish eyes.
Miong, on the other hand, shared nothing of our wonder, and Manila, I soon saw, left him cold, his interest in the sights a mere feint for the driver, I realized. Once we got off the kalesa and into my rooms, Miong went straight to business. More or less, in not so many words, as you know I am a bit verbose and my friend is annoyingly taciturn, I paraphrase below Miong’s agitation.
—Mundo, he said, you’ve got to go with me, you with your learning, and I with my brawn, to join the revolution.
—What the f—, I said, truly eloquent.
—Santiago’s coming for me tonight, pretty soon, and you may as well join me, because, to be honest, you are not living up to your potential.
He looked around at my miserable rooms as if to make the point.
—Well, f— me, I exclaimed, peeved, though I should have expected this backhand compliment.
—Anyway, you’ll have to put me up every time I come to Manila for the meetings. I have no idea where they’re taking me, Miong added, peering suspiciously out the curtains, but I am confident I will pass their tests, as I am already a Mason.
—Mother of f—, I declared, with amazing erudition.
I was not as surprised as I paint myself to be in the above profane pantomime, but the dashes, I believe, sufficiently underline the drama. Anyone might wonder with me that I was part of the historic moment when Miong joined the Supremo’s war, given the fate of their future encounters.384
Santiago, Kapitan Mariano’s son,385 386 that tiresome busybody, soon arrived. What can I say about Santiago except that I wish him well? Those two were scions of Cavite, Miong and Santiago, who were born to command, while I was a wiseass bastard. All I had in common with them was that shared fishhook of a creeky landmass, which, come to think of it, was not much, let me tell you.
At the time Santiago was a well-shaven youth whose sincerity excused (but not completely) his pompous air. He was earnest but, most of all, he had an amazing head of hair—I used to call him Señor Brillantina®, but only when he was drunk and he did not seem to mind. I knew him from the Latinidad and had last seen him in that brawl, thrashing Agapito with a toothpick in Binondo.
It was only later that I appreciated the constant anxieties that beset him and erroneously gave him a look of gloom. No one talks about those of us who gave their bladders, nay entire gastrointestinal systems, to the revolution. I have seen Santiago suffer his incontinent malaise with the pent-up agony of Saint Sebastian. Even his stomach was heroic.387
We rode in a kalesa to the telegraph office.
There we were blindfolded and bundled into another kalesa toward who knows where. A small altercation occurred, I’m a bit ashamed. I made a fuss about the blindfold. I mean—Jesus Christ—I’m nightblind. I couldn’t see anyway, for Christ’s sake. But Santiago was firm: no, no, Don Raymundo (he was very polite, calling all of us Don, though we used to play nasty tricks on each other in our underclothes in San Roque), no, no, you must wear a blindfold, it is the rule.
Fucking stupid rule it is to blindfold a blind man.
But Miong held on to my arm in that firm way of his and said, Mundo—Bulag—cut it out. I kept quiet and let them do it, but I silently chalked down a black spot in the checkbox of insanity, one for the revolution.
I know now we went toward Trozo, but at the time I only knew we drove close by the esteros, because, as I said, I have bat’s ears. I heard the river. I mean its rats. And then, not so much the river but the traffic along it, the wooden thud of oars against the banks, muffled bamboo knocking, plonk of paddles and clatter of clogs as people got off and on every so often as we clopped toward our goal.
But most of all the rats—a musical rabble of weak monsters scurrying softly about their dark excursions. And I have to say, in that ancient moment, rattling along in the blind kalesa, I felt one with them all.
When we got off, it was Miong who was a bit discomposed by the blindfold, tripping on everything as he slipped to the ground. I, on the other hand, knew my way with my hands, how to handle the backseat and fall to earth.
It was Miong who was dizzy, staggering into the house, and it was he who had the devil of a time in the oaths. On the other hand, I passed my examination with flying colors, not knowing what I was doing at all. While he—they kept him at it until almost curfew at least, trying to get him to speak the right answers to their tests. I ended up watching this all with Santiago, who whispered to me: Don Emilio has to stop answering like a Mason—this is the Katipunan, not the Oriental lodges, tanga!388
I know, reader, you are on the edge of your seat, waiting for the details of our initiation. For in imbibing this scene, the reader partakes of the body of our freedom. The holy sacrifice of independence: this scene is the Mass of the nation’s redemption. When blood turns on the initiate’s knife, so indio turns into Filipino, and slave transubstantiates into Soul.
Oh History! Oh Fate!
One moment we were Spain’s servant and the next we are her scourge!
But no matter how much I call upon the Muses, pale-cheeked, preferably naked Mnemosyne, the sober stylus of Memory, the scratchy glimmer of my recall—all I draw is this blind blur—of stepping into a room that smelled of a nauseating mix of kerosene and bagoong, the shrimp fry a sly whiff off my breath, or maybe that was the misguided perfume on the arm of the lady who led me. (I knew she was a girl because she pinched me without ceremony when I moved too close to her chest: what could I do, even a blind man could tell she was practically naked under her camisa.)
At some point in the night I heard a shout saying, of all things, for no apparent reason, Cold! Cold!,389 in the startling voice of a shrill Visayan. To be honest, in my nervousness, I was Warm! Warm! Mainit, mainit!
My armpits were wet.
Then I believe they made me do the limbo.
Oh God that I cannot do more service to the nation than this—dancing stenography of details, my silly redacted recall: not for some witty moral purpose, mind you, but just because I’m a dunce. Now all these guys swear there were, first, skulls and crossbones, then bloodletting and banners, and then divine decalogues sworn over dead bodies, all that rot that smacks of gothic fiction.390 Well, to each his own. Whereas, what I remember was passing underneath a covered table in the dark, bending low while someone shouted questions, and all I could answer was, Damn you, of course, I love my country, idiot, but as for dying for her can I think about it?
Then Santiago kicked me in the shins.
Finally they took my blindfold off, and under the glare of the oil lamp I recognized him before I saw him: Andres Bonifacio, the Supremo, with a handkerchief in his lapel and a triumphant smile on his face.
The Supremo swore us in.
You know I would recognize his voice even in the wilderness.
I had heard it before.
Only later did I learn who he was, but all along that strange blindfolded evening I kept wondering where I had heard that Tagalog rasp, a low melody of vowels. He instructed me to stop being a poisonous weed, to love my neighbor as myself, unless he’s a Spaniard, and don’t do unto others what your wife does to you—or was it to stop doing what you don’t want done to your wife? Whatever. They had so many don’ts but you get the drift—it’s the thought that counts. In any case, in that still night he spoke with a haunting speech, as of an echo from the past.
I couldn’t place it.
In fact, altogether, there was an impossible conflation in this untidy moment with an incident that had occurred before, and I ransacked the closets of my dirty mind for this solemn event’s partner in time. Just kidding. My mind, of course, does not work in such logical metaphors, and time does not dwell in cabinets. What I mean to say is that there was something oddly redundant in the voice of the man before me, and when I saw him, in a flash I recognized his twin. Well, not really in a flash—but you’ve probably guessed by now to which episode I shall soon flashback.
The handkerchief gave him away.
It’s odd to think how he was so well dressed for a workingman, and I understood that—I understood the dry itch, like a rasp in the esophagus, of upward mobility; and sadder still, is it that he had just the one suit?
The man before me was the same man who had defended the sacred novel in that latticed room in Ermita where Agapito used to meet with his radical book club. At least, I thought then it was a radical club only to discover they were mostly a bunch of homebodies who ate too many churros.
I hate to admit this, but in that flash of recognition during my initiation into the Katipunan, by the Supremo no less, with Santiago prodding me into patriotism and Miong making all the wrong Masonic answers in the background, my thoughts, of all things, flew to the serving girl Orang of Ermita, my erstwhile skeletal love, and I wondered, with an ache akin to that of rapists, to which forlorn fool she was now showing her skinny chest?
Anyway, that man in Ermita who challenged the crippled lawyer over his nasty reading of El Filibusterismo was, there you have it, the founder of the Katipunan.
Now you know.
What a difference time makes. Now he was in this poor man’s quarters in Trozo, whereas before I had met him smoking with gentleman lawyers in a mahogany room.
What had he said to that shallow critic? Quote. “You have a right to your opinion, but I must challenge you to a duel for your thoughts.” Unquote.
Sadly for me, it is details like this that buzz like bedbugs in a holding pattern in my brain.391 392
I remember exactly the handkerchiefed man’s words, and my shock to see him now before me, ordering me to shed blood for my country, in front of a bunch of pensive farmers and somber witnesses, was great, as you can imagine. I agreed immediately, not having much choice as they had daggers. Then someone slit me on my left bicep (tip: it doesn’t hurt as long as you don’t look), then I signed my name with my blood. It looked like this: R Mat
My script was kind of thrifty because I did not want further bloodshed, given that it was at my expense, but even though I left out the final vowel, running out of blood, they were satisfied. Then they asked what I wished to be called in the revolution, and seeing they were serious, not joking, I answered without thinking.
Paniki?
I posed the name as a question, but they took it as fact, and to this day I regret my quick response for sometimes it seems I could have chosen a more masculine alias, instead of a freaky flying beast.
I could have called myself Elias, brawny and elemental precursor of the revolution.393 394 395
Or, to continue the literary motif, Aramis de Kawit (to be jumbled cleverly into a fighting anagram, Iskrima de Tawa396)?
Or what about Rodolphe, after the hero of the Mysteries of Paris?
I mean, why I called myself a blind freaking rodent only an ass can explain. What was I thinking?
In any case, Paniki I was and Paniki I shall be.
In the meantime, they were still trying to cast out Masonry from Miong’s soul, while to my credit I was two steps ahead, albeit transformed into a son-of-a-bat.397 398
Later, I reminded the Supremo of our first encounter and asked about the lame critic in the shawl.
Ah, he said, that’s just the way he is, old Ka Pule—Don Apolinario to you. He will out-Rizal Rizal.
That’s blasphemy, I exclaimed.
The Supremo laughed: Wise men like Don Apolinario are not the same as you and I.
You must be joking, I said.
Who’s this?, Miong asked (finally passing his test, and, I might add, choosing an entirely appropriate name, after a saint, no less,399 400 401 unlike some out there who may as well have been baptized by lizards).
Oh, you should meet him—Don Apolinario is sickly, but he has more brains than all of us put together.
I was skeptical and wanted the Supremo to elaborate, but we were running out of time.
It was almost curfew, and after the ritual libations we had to leave.
But, oh, I had so many questions now that I had found him again, the defender of the holy book’s honor. He seemed like an amiable man, the Supremo, and I thought if I pumped him, he’d tell me all he can. Especially, I wanted to know about that noble sequel in question, which, after all these years, I had still not read. After the Writer’s exile, the authorities were brutal, and anyone with the books kept them locked in their trunks. People bragged they owned them but no one saw them around. It’s tricky for readers when their favorite author is an outcast. I mean, if you ever tried to get their autograph, it might kill you. I kept getting mixed reviews from different people who, I now realize, were as ignorant as I. Did Elias resurrect (I guess not, unless Jesus Christ turned up)? Did anyone kidnap Maria Clara from the convent? So many cliffhangers that demanded solutions! But the night was almost over, and anyway, they wanted to talk about revolution.
On the way out of the house, I noticed a shelf covered in a scalloped cloth. That was it, I thought. While Santiago and Miong said their grim goodbyes, each looking a bit stunned, with that constipated look of those who’re sworn to deathly secrets but can’t wait to share them, I took off the cloth and found it: quite a library of novels and histories. The Supremo had a sinful stash. I saw, with a stopped heart, that the fatal book, El Filibusterismo, lay under the runner, innocent as can be. And I will confess now, as that time is over and my days are numbered, it was on that evening that I was sorely tempted to commit my first crime. I desisted. Hurriedly, I covered it up again and walked on. I left the Supremo’s copy of the secret book on his shelves, unmolested, though I do wonder where history has purloined it, trusting as I do in the mischief of time.402 403
367 The memoirist speaks in the declarative present. Presumably memoirs cannot sustain the declarative tone because the shackled focus of the present tense limits the writer’s lens. Isn’t that right, Ms. Translator? Is there no one home anymore to make the remarks about language—hah, Mimi C.? (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
368 Here the memoirist employs a straightforward simple past, a retrospective tone with a broader frame of vision than the declarative but still bound by temporal limitations. How does that sound, Mimi C.? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
369 The memoirist sets up a jarring mix of the future (couched in the present tense) and the present (couched in the simple past), indicating a flash-forward in time, a fatidic tone that has a mix, slightly vertiginous, of anachronistic prophecy and unavoidable tragedy. A memoirist uses the fatidic tone rarely, or not at all, as it has its dangers. I for one prefer to know exactly what happened to Benigno! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
370 And you, the critic, use the obvious tone: come on, Estrella, silence! (Trans. Note)
371 That is, little mayor. The term is both aggrandizing and condescending; Raymundo’s tone splits the difference. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
372 In Quiapo (the Fonda Iris, on the other hand, was a dubious hostel in Paco Dilao). Well-known haunt of streetwalkers, or mujeres publicas. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
373 Sssh! Silence! (Trans. Note)
374 Zacateros sin zapatos: Raymundo’s penchant for alliteration continues. (Trans. Note)
375 Sssh! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
376 Une petite petate: annoying French indulgence here. Petate simply means mat-bundle, or portable sleeping mat, of woven straw. (Trans. Note)
377 That’s a thought—Emilio Aguinaldo carrying his banig to sleep over at his friend’s house. The last time someone did that at my house—when I was twelve—our houseguest had to stay over because of the dictator’s martial-law curfew. She ended up giving me kuto, and it took me weeks to get the lice out of my hair. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
378 That’s a charming thought, Estrella, but as we have agreed: let’s just read! (Trans. Note)
379 What? How? You can speak but I cannot? Enough of the vow of silence! Our readers need our wisdom. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
380 Sssh! (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
381 Silvestra “Betang” Rivera was Rizal’s aunt and mother of Leonor Rivera, the hero’s doomed fianceé. Was she related to the pilot from Bai? It’s tempting to note coincidences, but real life is not so: Leonor was from Dagupan. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
382 A capitalist at a tender age, Emilio Aguinaldo dropped out of high school when his father died; he became a daring young merchant on a seafaring banca, buying and selling fishing nets and other implements. By all accounts, Aguinaldo was a teenage businessman who grew up mastering life’s practical arts, which led to his becoming mayor at age twenty, general of the revolution at age twenty-four, and killer of the Supremo at age twenty-five—bastard! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
383 “Ulang linalaki.” Were those the words in the original, Ms. Translator? Filipinos apply gender to rainstorms. Softly falling, steady, and long-lasting rain is feminine; shortlived, sharp bursts of rainfall are masculine. Ms. Translator? Come on, speak up—why am I doing your work?? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
384 Readers of Part Four, “The General in the Revolution,” keep expecting Raymundo’s bat’s-eye view of the “future encounters” between Emilio Aguinaldo, first president of the Philippine Republic, and Andres Bonifacio, founder and Supremo of the Katipunan. I’m still searching for those sheets. Ms. Translator—Ms. Translator, hoy! Wake up! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
385 Mariano Alvarez, father of Santiago, mayor of Noveleta, Cavite, and head of the Magdiwang group of Cavite’s katipuneros, opposed later to the Magdalo group of fellow Caviteño Aguinaldo, was a relative by marriage of the Supremo, Andres Bonifacio, an irrelevant detail, however, at this point in the narrative. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
386 If it’s irrelevant, can we not get into it? Let us read. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
387 Is he making fun of the noble Magdiwang hero Santiago’s digestive troubles, which may be traced to Santiago’s patriotic travails in the Revolution, when rebels had to hold in their guts in the midst of battle and eat the wild forest’s shoots and watermelons, foraging like animals in those uncertain days?! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
388 The flavor of the expression perhaps needs no translation: “naïve one” comes to mind as a mild evocation of his sarcasm; “idiot” is more accurate. (Trans. Note)
389 Oh good to hear from you, Mimi C.! Welcome back. P.S., the Katipunan password was Malamig, meaning cool, code for “all’s well.” (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
390 El gótico was the term for certain types of ghostly romances, a genre Raymundo scorns though it is clear that, like me, he read the tales. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
391 “. . . que charla como un chinche en la cabeza”: a mysterious phrase since bedbugs do not speak nor nestle in brains. (Trans. Note)
392 Oh, hello, Mimi C. Welcome back again!! (Estrela Espejo, ditto)
393 Supporting lead of Noli Me Tangere—clearly a better man than the lead character, the Spanish mestizo Ibarra, because Elias was a man of the people, an inspired revolutionary whose avant-garde venom could only have arisen from the oppressed lower classes. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
394 Please. Okay, I will interrupt my silence to tell you—the family history of Elias belies your one-dimensional analysis, Estrella! Elias was a dispossessed landowner, like Ibarra, thus placing him, like Ibarra, in the class of panginoong maylupa; this dark bandit was educated and (before his fall) bookish, like Ibarra. In fact, the trajectory of Ibarra’s biography follows that of the bandit Elias, the two being obvious literary doubles. Rizal regretted killing Elias in the Noli but coyly does not note that, in terms of literary economy, he killed him because his book did not need two of the same. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Hampstead Heath, London, England)
395 Oh yeah? You know more about the novel of Rizal than I, a Filipino who lives amid the country’s sweltering mangroves, suffering with the people, while you are a traveling wombat, fake diwata, a half-baked mestiza whose knowledge of the nation begins and ends with— (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
396 That is, Lance-of-Levity, or Comic Fencing Match. Noting the anagram (minus w), I curse you, dueling pair, Estrella and Diwata: dami kasi arte! Sssh! Let Raymundo speak. (Trans. Note)
397 That is: . . . ‘jo de puta . . . (Trans. Note)
398 Sssh to you, too! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
399 Miong’s nom de guerre was Magdalo, after the Magdalene, patron saint of Kawit. His men were also called Magdalo. Their fellow Caviteños, called Magdiwang, became their rivals in war. Modern-day rebels who invoke the Magdalo brand show a finely tuned irony and sense of history. The Magdalo of Cavite, loyal to Aguinaldo, began as a troop of perhaps idealistic rebels and ended up, well, shortsighted: history rightly judges them with harshness for KILLING THE SUPREMO! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
400 So this is the crux, the end of my patience. Enough, Estrella, enough. All readers of history are prey to this revolutionary postscript—dueling memoirs that arise from ashes of war. Magdiwang writers jumped the Magdalo to the gun: Artemio Ricarte and Santiago Alvarez, both Magdiwang, penned the first memoirs. Then that elegant stylist, Don Apolinario Mabini, damned Aguinaldo in sublime dudgeon. Miong Aguinaldo never recovered from Mabini’s prose style. It took him six decades before he published the Magdalo version of events (though before that the historian Agoncillo did function as his ventriloquist). But he was too late: by that time he was a villain, a schemer, and a murderer in the eyes of many (and to be honest, I agree). The point is: he became so not necessarily because of established fact but because he did not frame the narrative. The question of why Aguinaldo took so long to publish—The Mystery of The Tardy Memoir—is thought-provoking. His image as villain was convenient to Americans, the actual combat enemy. In this quarrel, Filipinos forget who their enemy was. Who benefits?! The Magdiwang case, the vilifying of Aguinaldo, suited the eventual occupiers (which does not mean that Magdiwang statements were untrue). Aguinaldo’s memoirs show he was, at best, an insecure egoist who lent his instability to others’ schemes. At worst, Bonifacio’s death points to him, however ambiguously, as party to murder. So the Interesting Case of the Dueling Revolutionary Memoirs may be no postmodern mystery. The first president of the Republic is, as we suspect, less than a hero, and his tardy recollections are acknowledgment of his failures. This does not lessen the following fact: Estrella’s agony is symptomatic, a fantasist’s angst. The Supremo Andres Bonifacio’s death rightly inscribes trauma—it is the emblematic wound of all Filipinos betrayed by fellow Filipinos. (One notes that Aguinaldo, in turn, was betrayed, though not killed, by Filipino turncoats in America’s pay.) This duplicitous sense of self, the Judas wound, marks the country’s notion of its humanity, so potent in its history. We agonize over that which makes us imperfect, most human. For our enemy, we conveniently ignore that war’s obvious, material problem: the islands’ subsequent occupation by the United States: hello! Why were some memoirs published and not others? Ask that! Only in the story of Rizal is there no Judas kiss, which may explain why, given the country’s complex aversion to the past, it clings to the hero Rizal with implacable ardor. Rizal’s death is simple: Spain killed him. Filipinos are not complicit in his blood. Emilio “Miong” Aguinaldo, on the other hand, is troubling—he is the man in us whom we prefer not to see: the sinner in our midst who is ourselves. Just as we will never see Rizal as a man because we idolize him, we will not see Aguinaldo as a man because we vilify him. (Dr. Diwata Drake, New York, New York, U.S.A.)
401 Whoa, Aramis de Michigan. Calm down. (Trans. Note)
402 Dr. Diwata, let me explain the physical nature of my “implacable ardor,” as you call it—though you do not deserve my patience! I recall distinctly when my illness began, this withering in my arteries, my stultified knees. It was late in June in the year martial law was lifted by the tyrant, and yet the country was no more changed than I was by the proclamation. I was a freshman in college taking Philippine History and Institutions 101. I had always been a bookworm, an idealist—yes, as you say, a fantasist. As a kid, I used to collect the posters of the heroes and labeled them with their corresponding epithets, because I was a nerd with weird compulsions. When I learned about the political assassination of the Plebeian Martyr, Andres Bonifacio, by the men of the First President of the Republic, Emilio Aguinaldo, I was not only surprised that I had never heard about it before in my high school textbooks: I went into septic shock. My breathing froze in that room at Palma Hall Annex, and my asphyxiated shriek before I slumped sideways from the graffitied desk onto the lap of my blockmate, a pale, kind of palsied kid from Panay, made the entire classroom go still (or so I was told, as I had gone into abasic atrophy, a kind of failure of the nerves). I remember (or fancy I do) the ambulance, the brief blur of flame trees in my rolling vision, the concerned face of my professor (the bifocaled, unwitting perpetrator of my nervous wreckage), as I was strapped onto a trundle, given emergency respiratory help, a blood pump, a pale, camphor mask. My classmates waved at me as if calculating already whether or not they could take time off to go to my funeral. It was a minor seizure whose source the doctors could not fathom—whether I was epileptic, schistempsychotic, or just plain pathetic, it was a mystery to them. I returned home for the rest of the term, and in those months all history books, even komiks versions, were banned. But secretly I read. By the end of the year I was back at college, but this time armed with the weight of history—not to mention all the kilos I had gained from provincial bibingka, lumpia, and puto. In this way I became a vessel of the country’s pain, a small price to pay for truth. If this is a symptom, then what is a country? A tumor of ideology?! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
403 Yes. (Dr. Diwata Drake, New York, New York, U.S.A.)