Entry #41
The lechera kept going about her business, and I followed.
I did not go by the horse carriage roads. As Father Gaspar had instructed me, obedient, I crawled by the ricefields and swam under mangroves.
And I went by cover of night.
Yes, I, Raymundo Mata, with degenerative macular morbidity, and the nyctalopia will only exacerbate: I wound my way through the wilds of Dulumbayan, Calubcub, and Bilarang-hipon, the oasis of Balic-balic and groves of Manggahan—I went my way without sight. I edged beyond the kalesa paths, across palay harvests, sapa, and streams. I ranged like the Cyclops and roved more or less like three-legged Oedipus; I did not sing like Homer. I have a dark, empty area in the center of my vision but an acute sense of sound. No, it’s not that. I don’t know if I can call it sound, or even sense—how do I put it?
It was not my body that had the ability to hear. It was the world that revealed itself to me.
I can hear the touch-me-not close. It shudders, a brief pitch that sends with pain its signal of shyness. And the shattering ripple of the dragonfly as it touches the timid plant that closes in on itself like a book: that, too, announces itself to me. I hear not only the swish of wings, but the width of places, the secret measures of my walk. And it is in this way the world becomes itself as I move. Gust of wind, crackle of stone, and there—the lightness of her walk.
—What are you doing?, she asked.
—What are you doing?, I asked.
—I’m minding my business, she said.
—I’m minding mine, I answered.
I followed the wisp of her skirts toward a clearing. No one was around.
Leonor the Lovable reeked of lime and tobacco, the residue of her full day’s work. Her tongue was gastric red from the acid of her buyô, and there was something itchy about her. Neither of us had washed. An old woman, or maybe a girl withered to a lifetime of calamity: her body was this scrabble of scabs. She was soft in hidden places. She took me into her, she did not struggle. Her skirts smelled of piss and her blouse of cow. I smelled worse. Before sound turned into morning I was already a pig.
I don’t know what it is about me that I contain nothing but semen and words. Because the writer died while he was writing. My lechery with the lechera inflames me even now; we had no doors to lock, and she moaned in the moonlight with the milk in her loins completely free. That rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named.516 Maybe she was sixty-three; maybe she was twenty. In the nighttime she was wrinkled, like the score of lines on a mother-of-pearl; in the daytime I wished her to look young, like my mother. She didn’t. She had the look of the woman she was: a pockmarked soul, I thought.
And I was a humping hunchback.
Once more let me digress, admit one last thing: I would never have found him, the Supremo, if not for that lechera, rare and radiant, whom the angels. On that morning far away in Binondo, after I stepped out of Father Gaspar’s dim bar—it was her gait that had called me, but in the end it was she who took me home. Leonor lived in Sapang Palay, though her routines and her resourceful modes of living splayed her skirts all over—through Tutuban, Sulucan, and Uli-uli, through Caloocan, Mandaluyong, and San Juan. As I said, I had left Father Gaspar to his erudite mysteries, pumping him as much as I could for information, and getting only enough, not much.
I understand a few days later the Spaniards tried to do the same, but that’s another story I’d rather not inhabit, as it seems that if in fact I have a soul (whatever is left of it now in this numb ravening dungeon), I feel, that mite, my soul—I feel it tear up in little pieces when I remember what the Spaniards did to Father Gaspar.
When I woke up and saw her, my lost Leonor—I leapt up from the grove—one more body among the banyans after the Battle of Balara.
516 . . . la doncella rara e iluminada, por los ángeles llamada et cetera. A free translation. (Trans. Note)