Entry #40
Even now when I recall my tossings and turnings that night, a fist of anxiety clenches in my chest and I feel winded. I left in the morning. Just to be safe, though I believed my name was not on their lists, I wound my way through Manila in the masque of a wandering laborer, carrying only a woven petate, papers stashed into it along with one pan de sal, and a pen. I wrapped [ ]502 in my rags as I imagined fleeing Romans wrapped their cursed crosses.
The minute light crept down the esteros, I crept along with the silent hue, my slight figure one with the sonar tune of lecheras and buyeras, whistling guides whose untroubled faith in their routines’ immortality gave off a creepy serenity to the morning. Happily, I followed the charms of one maiden, sleeve of her cotton camisa flopping over her merry pails, showing a tanned and lacquered arm, a burnished shoulder.
Sunlight warped her golden figure like a medieval mandorla about her dress and suggested, in its caress, the innocence of Filipino womanhood. Just kidding. That’s in the portrait book Tipos Filipinos, full of stereotypes. In truth, this lady had sores on her legs and shoulders and face, like the ravages of midnight sin—worse than a trail of mosquito bites, even from a distance.
“Leche!”503 she yelled at the morning.
How is it that one’s loins perk up at the most inconvenient times, even at the unlikeliest sights, shooting up like little muskets? Things fired up inconveniently at her hustling cackle, but I sensed she would have nothing to do with one who looked like an escapee from the polo, though she herself looked like a guest from the islas de convalescencias. Anyway, I couldn’t waste my money, not even for one nip of her creamy, I mean tip of her dreamy—oh, what the hell, she was gone before I could unscramble my cheek from my nasty tongue.
There is something about the empty roads of a bustling city that presents fake balm to troubled hearts. When I stepped into the café at the corner and saw him, I knew, however, that fate had a plan for me.
—Hijo, he said.
A dark scrawn, a bit humpbacked, or finned: in the shadows, a lone abalone drinking barako.
It was my old Latin teacher, Father Gaspar of the Ateneo Municipal.
He was, as I said, a sad ichthyological shamble, and I swear it was as if he had not moved from the suspicious shallows of our last meeting, when he had offered me the book.
What had happened to him since? I had heard rumors of him here and there, disparate conjectures of his allegiance depending on the politics of the dubious source. Whether he was a spy, a brother, or a double agent, a few claimed to know for certain though none had any proof. He was an obscure person of privilege, and his status as a native priest of Butuan in the Jesuit conclave still gave off that odd conjunction of both pathos and pride.
But at the café he looked simply the person he was, an addled professor: wizened, with glum fishy eyes. I understood that he still shuttled back and forth from the Jesuit dominions of his native south, and his long overdue book on Philippine fishes of the Sulu Sea had finally reached bacalao. Now the astronomical tower in Intramuros kept him busy, where he with a bunch of other mad amateur explorers scanned the heavens from an increasingly tenuous perch in the Spanish walled city, trying to gain perspective from the seat of power: a doomed project, in short, though some say their science was decent enough for men who believed in God.
The fact was, I felt guilty about not having looked him up at all in the years after school, after the book—but then my life had turned so different from my expectations. Instead of a scholar, I’d become a skunk. I stood before him a stinking paragon of slime: stealer, klepto, ravisher.
But I felt this déjà vu, a whip of recognition.
—Balangay, I said to the old man on a hunch.
—Marikit, he replied, without skipping a sip.
It did not surprise me when the waiter announced, fist pumped in the air: Malamig!
And then in chorus, raising their cups, a pair of polo laborers in workers’ fatigues, sang: Mabuhay! Viva!—GomBurZa! (Repeat 3x)504
They kicked up their feet in unison, scattering some coffee beans.
A slapdash portrait, more an impression than an image, rose curtain-like against the café’s walls. A somber man in European clothes, mustached, top-coated, in a three-piece suit, gazed down at me with an ethereal nod, already missing his kamuning cane.
He had that diagnostician’s look, the shrewd accusing upturn of his lips, and at that moment, I fell into a swoon.
I woke up to the faint smell of crème brûlée. Women were dancing about, their dresses merging to unfold a flag, panels in gold and gules with the hoist of a Spanish crest (crowned lion by gilt masonry) that dissolved into pirouettes of stars and stripes that blinded my watering eyes. Then in a trice, confounding my guilty eyes: a can-can flourish, and I raised my spectacles to see. The ladies posed in adorable plié to show peekaboo bloomers in piquant ruffles—and before I could grasp at them they blazoned: the scarlet ground of a secret flag, with the letters K in triplicate, argent against bloody field—one letter each on a showboat triplet’s showboat rump!
I will admit it was a rousing play, punctuated by gongs from gamelan, kulintang, and other exotic forms of random percussion, with Muslim geishas swishing gigantic abanikos, creating useless movement, as fans do, like roosters in abortive death-moves. A headhunter going out of his head lunged in staccato irrelevance and soon enough wild painted men in yodeling poses stretched out their arms to the unfurled flag, now gyrating amid a row of bumping behinds, while to the side women with bizarre candles on their heads displayed the perfection of their balance with enchanting nonchalance.
So much was going on in the pantomime display I was dizzy from the demands on my praise, and once again, I swooned.505
When I came to, all I could do was applaud, but the chorus drowned out my feeble noise.
Damn, damn, damn the insurrectos!
Cross-eyed khaki ladrones!
Underneath the starry flag,
Civilize them with a Krag,
And return us to our beloved home!506 507 508 509
A bit of a panic ensued on stage, as it occurred to the singers that they had the lyrics to the wrong song. A flurry of scripts and operatic gestures, accusing fingers pointing at the bewildered strings, the rondalla (infantile rotund bandurria, and passive octavina, and guitar gazing at its navel in indifference, while bass attempted, in vain, to blend in without calling attention to itself). The rondalla struck a note of anguish, rapidly squashed under its own steam. The chorus resumed:
Damn, damn, damn the cazadores,
They say they come to crush the lawless
But no crime-fighters, they—
Really, they’re chicken stealers and cow-rustlers, hey! (Repeat 2x)
Refrain:
Call them cazadores—that’s a lie:
Saviors and law-enforcers, my eye!
Sock it to me, sacadores—
You’re just a bunch of extortionists and whores!510 511
Hey, sacadores—give us back our cantaloupes,
Tomatoes and watermelons! Cazadores: you leave us
With nothing—not even a shred
And then, in the midst of this ebullient potage came a voice: I tried to gather the source of grace—where amid the pageant’s scuttling shadows did the brief note arise? I could not, the instant I heard it, trace its pure trajectory, and perhaps for that reason it seemed to emerge from the awful tremor of my own bones. The voice was sweet, pained. It spoke dirge and demand. It ordered my confusion. It was as if, in the moment of its expression, an aimless hope came into shape.
You’ve heard the words before: you’ve sung the song. It asks a simple question: Aling pag-ibig?514 515 You have no reply, not because the question proposes your answer. It is precisely the speaking of it that creates grief: the need to speak is the sorrow. These were not, of course, reflections I pondered while the voice rang, ending in a kind of sepulchral echo in my heart’s chamber.
I was a runaway printer, after all, carrying a straw mat stuffed with stolen papers. I had no right to be moved. And yet I stood before Father Gaspar on that morning with a burst of love. Abstract, unfamiliar. It was, to be honest, an intolerable thing; I was a fatling in patriotic lard, a rice cake simmering in the saturated oils of a congested heart. It was a not so healthy state and yet the only one in which, at the moment, I could exist.
—Hijo, repeated Father Gaspar. What brings you here?
He was reading the morning’s papers with the apparent look of a professor extracting rhetorical silver from difficult propositions. One could sense his tense suspicion. As I said, he looked a bit like his fishy obsessions, a grilled tuna or lapulapu, with dead eyes and peeling skin; his veins pulsed about his forehead as if he were in simmer, glimmering in a pan.
—What’s the news, Father?
—At twelve midnight, on August 30, the country will erupt in revolt. The Supremo’s men will move to take the powderhouse of San Juan. You must look for the Supremo now. Lights will go out in the Luneta at precisely midnight, to signal the men of Cavite across the Bay to take up arms. Find the Supremo, but don’t go by the roads: the Guardia Civil is on the lookout for foolish men like you.
—Bless me, Father.
—Move on. Go. Remember, my child: nothing exists without an observer.
502 A crossed out phrase blots the manuscript here: “my sacred belongings”? “my Sacred Heart”? Something sacred. (Trans. Note)
503 I.e., milk: a Spanish curse. Just as Filipinos might have a hundred variations on the word rice, Spaniards play infinitely on the nuances of the word milk, and who knows why Spaniards hate their mothers?! (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
504 Balangay (ancient Tagalog term for unit of community); Malamig (cool); Marikit (pretty); and GomBurZa (Gomez-Burgos-Zamora): all Katipunan passwords. In addition, a portrait of Rizal in a three-piece suit adorned Katipunan places of ritual. Shows you that no matter what they say of Rizal as American-era hero, it’s the katipuneros who made love, or hay, with Rizal! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
505 I enjoy those anti-American zarzuelas, don’t you? My golly, but why is he in the American era already? The Cry of Balintawak of the First Phase of the Revolution hasn’t even happened. Anyway, I want to say our ingenuity gives me pride, how we used the old colonist’s spectacle of song-dance-and-drama to meet our needs—especially since in the American era you could not raise the rebel flag, and so actors enfolded it in dancing vaudeville skirts. And then how Filipino flair indubitably improves the thrilling conventions of Spanish folk operetta! The pandanggo sa ilaw is the acme of Filipina dancing talent, don’t you think? Isputing! That’s grace under pressure for you—balancing candles on your head! Don’t care much about the fans; they’re Southern. But where’s the tinikling, delicate boogie with bamboo, the epitome of talent of Filipinos on tiptoe? And the dance of the ricebird, what a romp! However, planting rice is never fun—you can say that again! Whoa—why does that racist hymn occur amid this fine display? Oh stuff my ears with a kundiman, won’t you, and dress me in a patadiong and balintawak! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
506 This is the racist refrain from the racist “Soldiers’ Song” sung at least three years later by racist American GIs in the Philippine-American War, one of many racist wars in that racist country’s history, and who knows when those racists will ever stop. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
507 Calling a spade a spade, aren’t we, Estrella? PS: If you send me an email, please do not be offended by my automatic out-of-office reply: I’m re-reading. (Dr. Diwata Drake, e-mail, out-of-office reply)
508 Calling a bolo knife a bolo. The American war is out of place in this section, for after all Raymundo has yet to join the Supremo at Pugad Lawin; get mixed up with his old friend Santiago in Cavite; with the Magdiwang take the towns of Noveleta and Imus but not his native Kawit (taken by rival Magdalo, led by old friend Miong, whose band by rights he should have joined); live with horror through the Supremo’s murder by old friend Miong’s men; guide Miong’s men along the bat caves on the path to Biak-na-Bato; become a general with the remnants of the Katipunan for his spectacular ability to creep into all the recesses of Cavite’s caves, just like a bat; live in seclusion in Kawit until the Americans invade; join the millenarian colorum with his old prious friend Benigno; and lastly fall to the G.I.s, one of whom seems to have secretly provided paper in Bilibid jail for this story.
This song “Damn, Damn, Damn the Insurrectos” is the touchstone of tragedy in the Philippine-American war. Two hundred thousand Filipinos dead in the American war, and that’s just civilians, not soldiers. Aha—I get it. Raymundo’s going nuts in that American jail. I guess it’s true that he was victim of both Spaniards and Americans, and as he is being tortured by G.I.s he comforts himself with sugar plum visions of Filipino culture dancing in his head. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
509 Hold on, Estrella: I’m re-reading. I’ll get back to you on this when I’m—
PS: If you send me an email, please do not be offended by my automatic out-of-office reply: I’m re-reading. (Dr. Diwata Drake, e-mail, out-of-office reply)
510 This metaplasmic wit—cazadores (i.e., Spanish law enforcement figure; literally: hunters) sarcastically turned into sacadores (extortionists, but also implying plain akyat-bahay, petty thieves)—seems lifted from the Supremo Andres Bonifacio’s classic poem “The Cazadores,” through which his Tagalog’s elastic playfulness shines. Maybe Professor Estrella can expand? (Trans. Note)
511 “Seems,” Mimi C.? Ehem. I’m going through Entry Number— PS: If you send me an email, please do not be offended by my automatic out-of-office reply: I’m re-reading. (Dr. Diwata Drake, e-mail, out-of-office reply)
512 Gladly, Mimi C. The Tagalog poetry of the Katipunan Supremo, the Great Plebeian and Martyr Andres Bonifacio has a folkloric wit that mirrors the authentic voice of Filipinos. His was an idiomatic force, an unadorned candor that spoke directly to the ordinary man: “Mga kasadores dito ay padala/Sanhi daw sa gulo’y lilipulin nila/Ngunit hindi yaong kinikita/Kundi ang mang-umit ng manok at baka.” The pungent verb, mang-umit, is comically mocking—and untranslatable: it evokes the pettiness of Spanish cazadores’ banditry and grievous constancy of that larceny. Bonifacio understood that the war was as petty citizen revenge against petty officials as it was an august ideological battle. His emphasis on common matter—watermelons and other gourds—to talk about centuries of grievance is a stroke of revolutionary wit aimed at the gut to get at abstract tissue: nationhood. Despite what ilustrado scholars say—damn damn damn the ilustrados!—I submit that it is Bonifacio’s Tagalog, much more than Rizal’s Spanish, that stiffened revolutionary fervor. One might even say that Rizal’s brooding poem, Mi Ultimo Adios (not yet written at this point in the plot, but anyway—ultimately Mi Ultimo was a text of individualist languor and indulgent sentimentality, with apostrophes in the end not to the Motherland but to the mistress!) fired up revolutionists because of Bonifacio’s Tagalog translation. Sure, the authorship of the Tagalog version is disputed by disgruntled foreigners—but who cares about them? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
513 To resurrect the Tagalog of Bonifacio, do we need to denigrate Rizal’s Spanish? Just asking, I’m just a grad student, not yet even a.b.d. (Trans. Note)
514 “Which love—?” The statement, in Tagalog, occurs in Raymundo’s text as an anacoluthon: an interruption suggests the reader’s knowledge of what follows. Perhaps Professor Estrella can expound? (Trans. Note)
515 Gladly. The Bonifacio poem, “Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa,” popularized in a copy of Kalayaan, the Katipunan paper that sadly went through only one issue, aborted by the secret society’s discovery, and now who knows where all those vowels went, begins with the question: Aling pag-ibig pa ang hihigit kaya . . . Gaya ng pag-ibig sa tinubuang lupa?: “Which love is greater . . . as love for the native land?” A beautiful plaint, yet to be answered. Tinubuang lupa, a reflexive construction, strictly translated as “land [ ] grew up in” or “land [from which one] grew,” is the newly uprising Nation, the cult around which revolution springs. As I’ve noted: this explosion of feeling, worded in poem and acted in battle, in 1896 is unprecedented in Asia’s colonized lands, and I still have no idea exactly how we fostered it. Except that, when I was a child during the Marcos regime compelled to be a “fatling of patriotic lard” daily during morning flag ceremonies at school, I, too, loved that feeling in my heart and wanted to kill communists or something. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)