Entry #30
June [1896]
We were to journey for at least five days, so I was to prepare food, linen, and reading material for quite a span of shipboard boredom. I was used to the quick hauls from Cavite to Manila on the ychaustis, those rickety boats you could not quite call steamers; I imagined that the large inter-island vessels that reached as far as the Jesuit posts in Mindanao must be infinitely more comfortable.
It was not to be so, when I got on. I did not have enough money to book Rufino and me on the passenger deck (for one thing, I had spent my last bits on the dry French dictionary mentioned earlier, one of those impulse buys it’s best not to regret—though you can’t help but feel stupid, cursed with that post-purchase shame that goes with the satisfaction of owning a useless book).430
Dr. Pio, comfortably lodged, with his fine medical bag on prominent display, was already on speaking terms with a number of katsila with whom he played checkers and some Filipino ladies with whom he played quite the gentleman, damn his smug clinical air.
Rufino and I had to make do with the smell of copra and coconut oil in the rancid belly of the stinking boat, sleeping with its cargo of cows and pigs.
Fortunately, we were free to wander the decks, where we observed the mad penchant of ladies, Spanish and Filipino alike, for the game of panguingue at all hours, and the truculent pigments of a quadrille of foreigners who traversed the ship in scowling formation. I followed them in exuberant proximity, aping their furrowed brows for Rufino’s amusement and feeling that manic expansion of spirit that occurs as a ship leaves anchor. But Don Pio,431 ever cautious secret revolutionary with a smug pistol in his pocket, soon put a stop to that entertainment, and told us to follow him instead in his promenade. This we did, and I soon found in this venerable doctor a gaping cauldron of monotony. My God, it was like walking with a sulphurous well! His vaporous fund of aphorisms was soon depleted, and I envied Rufino his mute status, not having the need to join in chitchat, letting the upper classes play the buffoon in the singsong dialect of their Spanish, or in candid Tagalog when a Spaniard passed by.
Later, we came upon three of the aforementioned ladies of the passenger deck, one of them in mourning, a plump, handsome foreigner.
—Don Procopio, the ladies greeted Dr. Pio.
—I was just relating to these two men the uses of hypnosis.
I was surprised by the doctor’s awkward prevarication—he was the worst liar, I thought, coming up with the stupidest possible tales.
Why bring up hypnosis if he could talk about waltzes or sunsets?
What a dunce.
The ladies eagerly asked for elaboration.
He had given himself a false name and occupation, a precaution neither Rufino nor I, poor obscure souls, required.
He styled himself Don Procopio Bonifacio, a dealer in medical books, especially of treatises on optics.432
I felt bad for the Supremo’s brother, the real, earnest Procopio, a wistful kid from Tondo whose simple image was so swindled by this unctuous persona.
The arts of mesmerism, magic tricks by candlelight, coin-swapping and earwigging and casual disappearing acts with a gun—nothing was beyond this coy counterfeit Procopio with his holster of tricks.
The ladies found delight in his tales of occult shamanism among Sarawak tribes, the medicine men of Patagonia, even the rank foolishness of the Englishman Darwin’s Theory of Apes.
I, on the other hand, could only glare at the extravagant fool. He performed for the ladies in a way he had not bothered with me and Rufino, transformed from a trite dolt into a succubus of tales.
—Tu un daldalero, Señor,433 Rufino muttered in his wake, spitting out Chabacano with his betel, splat on the deck.
But flattered by the attentions of the women, Dr. Pio was deaf to our wet compliments.
The foreign lady, I have to tell you, was striking. She looked like Jezebel, if you ever imagined Jezebel in grieving weeds. Or maybe she was Venus, avatar of our rickety ship and in her comeliness an ironic personification of our vomitous vessel.434 She had long, unkempt tresses, a bit like a mermaid’s, sometimes reddish, sometimes gold, and green eyes. She kind of smelled, a bit—a bit sultry, like the unwashed lavanderas of my early acquaintance, down on Calle Caraballo. But no, I must have been mistaken—that whiff of the body must have been my own glands of the devil at work. At first sight, in clothes like a widow’s, the lady seemed old: but on closer inspection, she was probably barely a teenager, like the third woman, a child introduced as Angelica.
The other Filipina, who seemed to be in charge, was Doña Sisa.
Soon it was that we accompanied these women on the decks, to and fro in slow pageantry, the doctor with his hands at his back, circling the ship with an easy garrulity, and Rufino and I, sick man and sick man’s helper, playing the roles of fine deaf-mutes for all we managed to say during the doctor’s hair-raising discourses, about witchcraft and pygmies and demonic amanuenses, as the boat docked first at the island of Romblon, with its white cliffs, then sped on toward Capiz and the southern ends of our languid journey.
Eyes at times green, or a prime blue, then in passing a blurred dash of gray, like those of a motile peregrine. I could not figure out that lady, the Scottish señora.435 What was it that ailed her? The talkative doctor’s stories must have influenced my imagination, as I thought she was a witch, a sprite, some kind of ambulant ghost. She wore black all through the journey, and yet, as far as I could tell from the conversation, no one had been buried. All I knew was that, if needed, I wanted to help. Sometimes she held her bosom as if a pain nailed her right at her heart. It was quite a bosom; I mean, it seemed quite a pain. Her mercurial eyes bewitched me, I will confess, but that’s because of my inexperience with the hypnosis of their changing colors. She walked with a commoner’s air, a swift peasant-like stride, and I noticed she cast her skirt between her legs sometimes in vulgar pique when she did not get her way at cards.
In short, her erotic mix of grieving sweetheart and senseless harlot aroused in me a sentiment I had felt profoundly only once before, in those dim drawing rooms of La Concordia, before that minx who, if I’d only known it then, held all the trumps. But unlike those days in Santa Ana, when I believed I was a hotshot scholar with a future, now I was a dull printer with a compromised life, my blood pledged to honor, death, and country, a secret revolutionary with no time for the inconveniences of love.
Are you kidding?
On that ship I didn’t think for a moment about my blood compact with the Supremo as long as the lady looked my way with some glimmer of recognition that at least I was human, and not just some blind lump this preposterous Don Procopio had taken in under his wing as a specimen of his kindness.
Here’s where I wished to God I had not been cursed to be held by the hand at night by a faithful servant, tapping with a kamagong cane along the way to the cargo hold, where we slept with husbandry, not wives, and though I had read a whole library of novels to comfort me in my debility, and I was a graduate of the Ateneo Municipal, and I could have enrolled in the University of Santo Tomas, if not for the outbreak of cholera not to mention the doldrums of heartbreak,436 and one day, after the revolution, I will travel to Australia like a brawny sailor, or maybe just to Andalusia, and drink of foreign waters with the temerity of a free man, still, the lady looked at me as if I were a mosquito, and sterile at that, without a sting to break her heart.
Not once did she call me by my name.
Instead, Rufino and I slunk back every night into our hold after making ourselves busy to others in the day—holding shawls and purses, pulling back chairs, respectfully doffing our hats, all those asinine kindnesses that never occurred to us we did not have to do. And I swear I could have been a hatstand or a footstool for all the lady thought about me: but this I realized, of course, in hindsight, not then. I lisped and preened and curtsied and, worst of all, accepted all of Dr. Pio’s lies. I didn’t even stop him when he began a tale about my burdened youth, when I was struck in the eye by a wayward friar, such fantasies of terror being apt to please the ladies. Instead, when asked in turn about my calamity, I bettered Dr. Pio and embellished the tale with a cause (undercooking the langka seeds, my master’s favorite snacks), specific weapons (a large spiky langka, no a bread knife, no a violent violin blade, including a whole culinary crescendo), curses (but I politely declined to illuminate the most venal), and harrowing denouement (bleeding, mucus-swelling, oh the flow of vitreous humor, and now this ineluctable night, my ravaged eye: sigh).
That was my most satisfying moment, when the lady looked at me with something close to tears, and then she outright sobbed.
We all stood up, concerned.
—It’s nothing, the lady said, just leave me. It just reminds me—
I was sad to think that she had perhaps experienced a childhood not different from my fantastic one, and I was almost ashamed to have deceived her, for I was, of course, a cherished nephew, while she, it turns out, was a cast-off child.437
So it was that we spent those days on ship, compounding deception with pity as we crept past the archipelago, all of us fooled by fate. For this trip, sleepy and uneventful, in which we docked without incident next at Capiz then in Iloilo, shedding our insipid cargo—pigs, cattle, and tobacco, sugar, goats, and candles—and not a single passenger from Manila to Zamboanga looking back to record our shadows—turned out to be a sensation, retold minutely and rehashed, questioned, quartered, and overdrawn. I wish for the life of me I could have taken care then to cut a finer, more striking swath. I mean, I bet a hundred pesos the doctor barely mentioned my name in his odious confessions, the scoundrel, and instead of being a major actor in a historic drama, I’m instead a minor detail in a hysteric’s act, doomed to molder in history books as some obscure blind man with a useless passion in the company of that lying Dr. Don Pio Valenzuela, future betrayer of the revolution.438
Whereas, in truth, what could history have become, if only someone had asked me?
430 I, too, have often been attacked by that shame, especially in the leaky stalls of the Avenida, where I have bought three copies of the same Penguin edition of Justine by Lawrence Durrell, when in fact the gap in my library was the fat midsection of the quartet, Mountolive. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
431 Pio Valenzuela’s alternate versions of this trip are available in at least three forms, each new version producing a pall upon the next—and a pox upon history! His first calumnies occur in the official Spanish documents collected in The Trial of Rizal by Horacio De La Costa. Next follow his twin, confusing testimonials appended to the yet-to-be-satisfactorily-annotated Minutes of the Katipunan: to wit, Appendix A, The Memoirs of Pio Valenzuela by Luis Serrano; and Appendix W, Testimony of Pio Valenzuela in the Trial of Vicente Sotto. A fourth version, The Memoirs of Pio Valenzuela, by Arturo Valenzuela, is a rehash of Appendix A, with minor postwar additions. Why so many versions? God knows, only Hudas not say. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
432 Ah, but the reader must understand the beauty of this document—how Raymundo fixes the historical facts! In Dr. Pio Valenzuela’s Memoirs, he cites his false shipboard name, Procopio Bonifacio, but Raymundo’s revelation of Dr. Valenzuela’s “occupation” as a book dealer is original; no other source betrays this detail! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
433 One of the diarist’s favorite phrases, a Chabacano weapon, meaning: You talk too much! Get it, Estrella—tu un daldalera. (Trans. Note)
434 Dr. Valenzuela’s otherwise nondescript memoirs corroborate Raymundo’s detail—the ship’s name was Venus. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
435 May I address the gossipmongers among us? Josephine Bracken, the “plump, handsome foreigner,” was most likely Irish-Chinese. The other two women on the boat, mentioned also in Dr. Pio Valenzuela’s memoirs, were Doña Narcisa Rizal-Lopez, sister of the hero, and her daughter Angelica Lopez-Abreu, who later became a katipunera, at age thirteen! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
436 El dolor de mis dolores, I take it. Raymundo gets quite lyrical here, very Rizalian, when talking about his old pains. (Trans. Note)
437 That Josephine Bracken was the adoptive (or foster) daughter of blind, allegedly syphilitic Mr. Taufer, a patient who had traveled from Hong Kong to Dapitan upon hearing of the famed Filipino eye surgeon of the tropics, is well documented. The griefs of her youth remain mysterious. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
438 Horacio De La Costa states in the Trial of Rizal: “The key testimony in favor of the prosecution’s case [against Rizal] was that of Dr. Pio Valenzuela. Now considered one of our heroes, Valenzuela does not come off well in [this trial’s] pages.” It’s not clear if Dr. Pio Valenzuela’s sins were intentional. Did it occur to him that his visit would have fatal effects? Who knows? The Spanish judges cited two damning scenes that convicted Rizal: the novelist’s return in 1892, when he organized La Liga Filipina (see Entry #24), and the visit of the revolutionaries to Dapitan in July 1896 (see the historic entries that follow). In fact, in analyzing Dr. Pio Valenzuela’s life, one learns this honored revolutionary had never even joined a single revolutionary battle. He sought amnesty with Governor Blanco at the outbreak of hostilities, completely muddled his testimony about Rizal, and did not join the war against Americans on his return from exile in North Africa in April 1899 (he preferred to remain in jail rather than pledge allegiance to America; other prisoners pledged allegiance, left jail, and promptly joined the revolution anyway). His biographer notes he was “disheartened” by the assassinations of Andres Bonifacio and Antonio Luna—a sentiment commendable in hindsight, but then by that time no one was alive to dispute it. What distinguishes Valenzuela is that he was one of the first to take up pen and write—which was easy, since he didn’t have much to recall. Raymundo Mata’s testimony, on the other hand, provides a compelling counter-memoir. Too bad it arrives so late. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)