Entry #35

Even now, I feel them on me: a pair of bleak gray eyes. As I tucked the papers in, awkward and beribboned against my loins, into my finally useful, rapacious karsonsilyos, I felt the gaze of the weeping woman. But nothing, not even my silent conscience, would deter me. The clumsy sheaves themselves indicted my guilty ribs. I did note the fresh mound, a clump of earth with flowers about it, a memorial corona shaped like a cross on an interstitial grave that almost obstructed my path. It was situated—let me see if I remember this right, just in case the details of that purloined hour might one day be of use, though I doubt it—it was by the steps, in an opening beneath the hut just small enough for grieving. I remember the keening woman of my morning dreams, and I wasn’t sure, in my delirium of flight, if those brazen eyes were in fact watching. I stumbled over it, the flowered patch of earth.

In my blindness, I almost, almost stumbled over it as I fled.

And now I return with lost foreboding to that moment back on the ship—when finally after my sawdust breakfast and faithless goodbye, the formal exchange of pleasantries and jars of preserved paho (plus secret gifts) between the two doctors, and our forlorn launch from that betrayed beach, we all climbed aboard our returned-to-sender ship, gaggle of revolutionaries carrying the weight of their finished business and already missing the mystic peace of the vanishing isle—I finally escaped their accusing eyes.

True, no one noticed my agitation nor the lumbering stiffness of my movements: each of the doctors was wrapped in his separate dilemma. Come to think of it, even in the best of moments, no one would have noticed me. Even Rufino brooded in his own manner, following Don Procopio and his new twirling cane.

I hid down in the hold where the cows bore me no grudges: and there, I threw my project on the straw. A pillow of magic. The sheaves jumped from my tainted hands. I gazed at my catch, my pilfered fish—these were my grace, my curse, and my bounty. I’ll show them all, I had said, all those mestizos and priests and ladies—all the astounded host. I’ll show Lady K (but I will avoid the gaze of the other’s weeping gray eyes). What did I have to show? My shadow sheltered those orphaned sheaves, now lifeless on the straw. I gathered them all again, in a bundle: burrowed in my petate. For those five days, they breathed under the cows, explosive as kindling.

Up on the passenger deck, as I said, Don Pio walked about with his new, fine kamuning cane. It was the hero’s gift, exchanged for Don Pio’s pistol. Good riddance. With awe, Rufino looked out for the mago’s cane during the entire trip, as if the stick were God’s subaltern.

He did not dare touch it.

Back on the shore of Manila Bay, when we got off the banca and quarreled again with the criminal pilot, who wanted more than his share of the passage as usual, being a Batangueño, all Don Pio needed to do was rap on the boat’s side with that kamuning cane—its garish mouths swearing their silent oaths—and, swear to God, the pilot was struck dumb.

So Rufino Mago tells the story.

Don’t you know, Rufino crowed to the nonplused Don Pio, that cane is encantado ya—that cane is magic!

The pilot took our small change, and without protest, without a word, he left Don Pio to his not-so-scientific stupefaction.

But I was preoccupied, I did not notice. I understood something had turned on that intolerable portage—as we sailed back through Cebu, Capiz, and Romblon—this time devoid of the flatteries of ladies, even of the smiling Segunda of our old Venus, who had abandoned ship around Jolo, we learned, but not without leaving (her form of affection) an entire crate of castrated feathers to her faithful castrated cook. For some reason on that journey the wind, a ceaseless unseasonal storming, burdened our days with a sense of failure, though our mission, or so claimed Don Pio, hoping against hope amid the din, was not really entirely lost. Or maybe it’s true that even in such details as harsh weather my conscience betrays me into imagining a damned deluge.

And yet—lash myself as I will, whip and batter that imp, my soul—still, I felt at the same time, yes, an odd terrible lightness. Even as I withered on that benighted ship: I carried in secret, against my bosom, that fledgling being: a novel. It scratched against my chest. It crackled as if alive. It breathed with me. That portage was intolerable—the way the absurd tempest of being is intolerable, the way the emergent hatchling of words, the slow reading of a story, is at times impossible to bear, and it’s best to put it down. But I didn’t. Across the country on that boat, I carried upon me, I guess, a pack of words: my own troubling war.