Entry #42
I was not a literal hunchback, of course. Where am I? No, it was later, after I met the rare Leonor, that I carried the suitcase of the Katipunan shaped like a medical bag. Like Dr. Pio’s mendacious kit, the one he carried on the trip to Dapitan. Right—why should you remember? That doctor, Dr. Faust, the one who irritated me no end, carried this quack doctor’s bag all around Dapitan. Well, not really: the porters and the servants carried it. His mimicry of the other one, the Doctor to whom we traveled, for whom I traversed, was so patent to me he could have been carrying a banner along with his kit: Where he is there shall I be! What a buffoon. God, I hated his guts. Anyway, there I was, carrying that bag like his on my back, like a man with gout, an inverted glut, like a uterus, behind me. Who knows whose it was?
A child a posteriori.
How did I get it? Where am I? I fell into my grave with a witch. Or in a ditch with a brav— Whatever. When Matandang Leon fell, Captain Carbuncle, as they called him, in the battle of Balara, the first battle, by the way, of the revolution,517 albeit accidental, but then all of them were accidental, now that I think about it—I caught this weight falling upon me. No kidding.
We had just come out into the sun, kind of drunk, for what does one do after tearing one’s cédula and crying out Fire before jumping into the goddamned frying pandemonio, you said it, of freedom?
One drinks.
Where was Leonor?
Anyway, our throats were dry from all that crying, we needed the refreshment.
On Father Gaspar’s orders, nay, his faith, yes, I had gone off and finally joined the Supremo—when, where, why, what the heck, who wants the details, since so many others have already provided their versions (at least seven, if you don’t count the liars) of the reunion, which none of them got right.
Father Gaspar’s directions, though sketchy, were sufficient. After all, I was a man of the Diario, an all-around man—before you even touch the Minerva machines, you start off as a paper boy with the routes of the city on the back of your hand. Where else could people hide but in places we didn’t reach, among farmers and laborers beyond the walls? The perisylvian canals and thatched palay penumbras could only lead me to the swamps and leeches of their gallant dens.
I knew where to go.
Sure, it is best, in the annals of revolt, to make shortcuts and cut out the crap—apostrophes to the divine, expository introductions of brave men who heeded the call to arms, classical-like enumerations of Achaean ships, plus the boring roll call of names that retell the lives of their fathers, semi-literate though classical thugs, with too many causes, as well as all the tragic epithets on the sad provincial provenances of the soon-to-be-dead.
But still it would be nice to introduce a few sterling men with rhetorical flourishes, and not simply a brief, opportune sigh for Matandang Leon—obscure and, as you’ve noted, unpremeditated in my story.
But to return.
I came upon him, the Supremo, in the middle of a meal, of all things, like Jesus Christ amid his disciples, except Christ had only a dozen. While he had a few hundred, some well-dressed, some barefoot, all welcoming me as if I were exactly who I was—not Barabbas, the other one.
It wasn’t really a supper, as you know the word—some smartaleck had hacked a wandering nag, or was it a castrated bull of a carabao, into pieces, and we ate scorched horseflesh, or some irredeemable hijacked hide, upon wet banana leaves. Another fine son of the people had “found” a jug of tuba.518
I was moved by my welcome. At that point none of us hungry and hunted men, after that discovery of names in the La Font printing press, knew when our next meal would be, and still they gave me rest and food without a word. They were barefoot and filthy, soggy and unarmed. They were scared, tired, and intolerably happy. You know, I have survived on kangkong and insects, the fruit of the narra and one bat, and once I had lived in the ruined boardinghouses of genteel Binondo, where Señora Chula treated dinner as not so much a meal but a religious rite, and at home in Kawit my uncle used to be an assistant priest, with a fine table and always at least two lechon at fiesta, and only a few months before I had dined on pickled paho with the gentleman hero in Dapitan.
But when I came upon the men of the Supremo once more, I felt like weeping. I felt, well—really really hungry. And as I dug into the hide and ate the flesh, it was the only time in my life I understood the meaning of communion.
Don’t ask me about how I got on with the sons of the people.
They got me drunk.
—Your father was a good man, Matandang Leon said, his tongue slurring, his face a blur.
It was late at night, and I had no idea who this horse-faced general was.
—But the man was an odd one, Matandang Leon said, el genio Jote. All of us bandits respect him, don’t worry.
I know that in any knot of Filipinos, bound by one thing or another, in our case Masonic-type rituals of bloodletting, reverent displays of skulls, and distinct notions of masculine valor, et cetera, it is possible for your genealogy to produce, I mean proceed you, and it is as a preexisting condition that you arrive, full-blown in your familial tumor, so that everyone embraces you into the fold and wonders when you’ll turn out crazy like your dad.
The drunk old bandit Matandang Leon, he of the flaming carbuncle and the fearless march, insisted that he knew my father.
I should have trusted this strange man’s confession, a monumental revelation fit for its own paragraph and best enclosed in a glass case.
But I hate to say—Matandang Leon did not have a look of probity. I mean, he was a bandit. True, he dominated the old lady’s yard519 with his muscular bulk—a well-hewn man of above average endowment. God, I wondered what it was like to be him—how many women could he have on his good nights? But this was not one of those good nights. His eyes were bloodshot, and his notorious carbunco, sure to be written up in song, if the fates have any sense, glowed like a red glistening jewel on his forehead and blinked at me like his third evil eye. Veins and dried pus festered at his wound as if the carbuncle were some geological mass, a dormant volcano, and his veins were the prehistoric clusters that witnessed its age. The unwashed wildgrass hair, the betel breath, the way he tore into the horse’s hoof like a tikbalang, a repulsive cannibalistic sight—I know these details are irrelevant, but they grossed me out.
Matandang Leon turned out to be one of those susceptible alcoholics—one drink and he was gone, as if drunkenness came from auto-suggestion, like a curse from a manggagaway.
When as a boy I longed to know of my father, I imagined the news reaching me as a bugle call from noble messengers, telling me the principe of Asturias had knighted him for his deeds. Not really, but still, I wished for a better news service, not this drunk with a bukol.
Why the Supremo chose Matandang Leon to lead us was a mystery, though I bowed to his intelligence, of course. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to see him again, the Supremo, and to show him my stash. No matter the shame. But he was kind of busy, what with starting the revolution and all—I could not get a word in with him. Even now I wonder, after all these years, what the hell he was thinking when he went off to Cavite in November and left these men from Manila—who loved him, loved him, loved him so?520 I stood apart from them, that’s true, carrying my ragged straw bundle, a bit like those pictures of the disciples’ last dinner, with the irrelevant, hungry dog in the foreground, and divinity recessed.
But that night in August we crowded round him like locusts, or bees driven to their maker, dancing in their hive.
Yes, I would never have found him, the Supremo—where am I?—for whom do I write?—to what does my mind regress?—if not for that lechera, rare and radiant, whom the angels. Some would say Leonor the milkmaid wasn’t much to look at, that morning I found her in a ditch, after the meeting with Father Gaspar, before I heard the clarion of Matandang Leon. No, not much to look at, I will admit—plus she had a nasty temper, worse than a wife’s.
It’s true, our first coupling was not worthy of a man, and even less of a woman, given that, technically, I would call it, without her urging, rape. I followed her, and she let me, but even so I am a craven ghoul. Even now I am not sorry, though even then I knew I was no good. The hounds of war at my heels, the roar of semen—ah, it’s all semantics, technically, a pretty drooling of words that disguises that raw burst of freaking manhood as other than what it was, my brute failure at being a man.
I followed her that morning because—because—I preferred to get lost. I confess. I didn’t think so then, because I was busy spilling it, but it makes more sense to spend seed than blood. I’m not much of the hero type. I mean, I’m fucking blind. Being with Leonor, with her leper body and her milky wounds, was by far, if you think about it with any kind of rational thought, an infinitely better alternative to killing other people. Really. I’d rather fuck a leper than go to war. That’s just common sense. I know, I know—the Spaniards were our enemies. But I’m just not a killer. I’m not even much of a rapist, as critical Leonor later smirked.
Really, I’m just a reader.
To be honest, I do not know if I would have gotten anywhere in this story if Leonor had not, in the end, kicked me out of her house.
Let me say, once more. With injustice I call her, lime of my life, slip of my tongue, light of my dungeon, a leper, when it is I who should hold this awful sign—do not touch.
I’m a wordy, worthless beast.
There is only one whose happiness I think of in these dying hours—in this dim bat cave of a jail, this prison of our last solitude—let me not kid myself, these days don’t look good, what with my friend Benigno laid out like a cross on a watered floor, somewhere in this maze of torture chambers that we share, here in the American hell.
My powers are waning but my memory engorges in terrible moments, especially when I smell my blood, crunch of salt on my chin in this churlish cell: and my spleen does not feel so good either. Oh, Americans of easy fame, we of easy faith: and here I am of uneasy fortune, waterlogged, mangled, and so they say losing my sight if not my mind: oddly enough, I see more clearly now than I ever have before, remembering Leonor.
More paper, please, G.I. man with the fat and thin weapons, skinny rifle on my skinned skin, fat pistol on my fatted scars: I throb but write.
It’s my own rebellion.
I like to imagine she sits somewhere in the sunlight out there, in Pangasinan or Panay, mixing tahô or selling planggana, hawking all kinds of harmless mixed-use wares out by Balintawak. I wish her among a brood of children and a good man by her side, preferably clear-eyed.
Leonor, here’s looking at you, if I might be allowed to use that verb: I hope providence, though blind, treats you well.
It was not I who told her my secret: the blasted woman goddamned stole it from me.
She’d gone through my belongings as I lay asleep, and as if in a dream, she thrust the papers at me like a sword.
—Sonomagun! Ispichoso! You’re one of them—you’re carrying secret papers and rebel documents! Plibestiro!
—Filibustero, I corrected her.
Of all people, it is the lecheras and the buyeras and the putas, and it wasn’t clear to me if Leonor was one or all of the above, who know of the comings and goings of furtive men, who understood clues of suspicion like goddamned sybils.
Leonor and her companions must have understood the inevitable outbreak of war months before we all recognized it ourselves. The secrets of the sleeping city are laid bare to those who trek through the labyrinths before we awake and after we lie in bed. And even now I am not sure if Leonor was one of the above some of the time or all of the above most of the time—I only know she had a walk and a look that marked her as a marvelous, ambiguous wreck.
In any case she had an understanding finer than that of a spy, who’s a mere pawn in the business, after all, while she is a powerful invisible eye: she’s a woman.
At first, when she discovered the manuscript, she would have nothing to do with me.
—Tell me what these are? she screamed.
—They are the hero’s pages, I said in a panic as she beat me up in her sad hovel.
—How dare you—endanger—my poor mother!
I didn’t even know she had one, and worse that she had all along been that limp hump in the corner of the room, never stirring, like a sack of copra, while we did the nasty thing!
—My ma does not need more pain!
But she’s barely alive, I thought, my God, she’s as animate as a bandehado, sleeping through your racket! How much suffering can a corpse take?
—Please don’t twist the papers, Leonor, please. That’s the hero’s novel.
—What hero, you worm, you thug, you pimp?
—The hero. Doctor Jose Rizal.
—Oh. My. God.
I thought she would pummel me right then when I said his name, maybe even drag her sleeping rag of a mother into the fray, to beat me up with the lump of her ma.
—Don’tyouknowtowritehisnamedownisacrimeandtospeakitisacurse? Toownhisbooksisstupidandtoreadthemisworse?
And so on and so forth in a burst of mellifluous malediction, and I could have mentally corrected her unforeseen prejudice or at least praised her rhyming run-ons if I had not been in such a bind.
Leonor held the sheaf of papers hostage in her mad hands.
I did not keep my eyes off them for a minute as she wailed and flailed.
I waited for the moment to snatch them, but it was a delicate issue, as I had to do it without harm to my quarry. I tried not to move as she cried, so as not to provoke the wrong gesture. My God that lady had a temper and a tongue. She was quite magnificent, if you discount her missing teeth and garlic breath, plus the way the buyô had coated with a reddening rust the rest of her dental squalor.
But you know, even her sores to me had an odd luminescence as I watched her fury, as if each scab and pockmark had some glory, and all I had to do was connect the scary dots and find my way home, or at least trace somehow, even if only by phonemic dabbling, her crooked symmetry into stars.
Then she calmed down and asked:
—So what are we going to do?
It did not occur to me then that the sweetness of the word—the word “we”—would be my undoing. The life of tenderness is best left to non-combatants, husbands and cowards and other lucky bastards who prefer to survive. It was not my life, as I had a commission from Father Gaspar, to wit, quote unquote, nothing exists without an observer, and anyway I had sworn an oath to the Sons of the People, with a little slit of a scar on my biceps to show for it, which I revealed to her later, and she kissed it awkwardly so that I felt her stubbly chin on my armpit—a curiously domestic affair.
She held the papers still in her lap, and I finally took them from her.
She watched me smooth out the sacred corners and pat down the wrinkles.
She had scarred some words, and her spit had damped out some inkblots. What words of the hero had been erased by her madwoman’s saliva, lachrymous lacunae to be deciphered by dumb scholars in our dim future? It was all my fault. I put the sheaves back in the creased square of the straw mat and again she asked:
—So what are we going to do?
If I had known Leonor then as I know her now I would have understood that to a woman of action questions are rhetorical and a plan was already in place.
She told me she had witnessed in her wanderings the escape of the katipuneros from their homes in the dead of morning, she had witnessed arrests and horrors. One man was torched in his hovel. Another was blinded by the Filipino guardia’s lash: whipped by his own neighbor. I won’t repeat the stories here, as even in the retelling the tales slit me up, find fresh places in my cut-up flesh, gained from the pity of Leonor. Most of all, Leonor repeated the tales of women, weeping women, women dragging at their men’s bodies, women clinging for their sons’ lives. Leonor had a peculiar quality of remembrance—I recognize now with lame wisdom that this was because, of those tales of pain, easily she imagined her own.
She had an ear to the ground for the whispers of the hawkers, and later she left me alone with her oblivious ma, who scared me to death in the middle of the afternoon when she suddenly sat up, and then all she did was roll cigarettes all day and smoke in peace.
When Leonor returned, it was she who told me where to go: toward the fields of Caloocan.
Father Gaspar had a key. It was Leonor who had a clue.
No war could happen without women.
Father Gaspar only had the script.
She kicked me out to get me on the road.
But bless me, Father, for I have sinned:
I did not want to leave.
I was seeking the Supremo because I believed he was the only man I could trust. I explained everything that day to Leonor, as if I were talking to my own self, because she had an odd way of taking on the expressions of the story, as if her face were a narrative mirror, and to be honest if Leonor had ever learned to read, she would have been a damned magician521 at it.
I told Leonor, only the Supremo will understand—like me, he loves the writer, not the hero.
Hadn’t I seen him defend the book, to the shawled cripple in Ermita?
I am sorry, but I must challenge you to a duel for your thoughts.
Leonor’s shy look of admiration for the Supremo’s polite boldness won my own silent praise.
I told her, the Supremo will tell me what to do.
She nodded with the anxiety I felt, the underlying question—but what would the Supremo say to my crime?
How would anyone respond?
Leonor’s face fell as it would in that ghost minute before the expectation of another reader’s horror.
Well, think about it, I said to her, the Supremo had read all of the Filibusterismo. Curse my life that I have yet to read that second novel, and what am I doing, wandering around with the thir—
And Leonor went into a reverie, that lingering mood that shadows base acts for which one fails to summon up regret.
And as a last confession I told Leonor, almost as an aside, as if it were the least of my worries, I still don’t know what came over me, why I walked into the hero’s hut, that kiosk on the rib of that cursed hill, with the garland of flowers outside it, a corona of color around a grass mound—and my disheveled mind still puzzles over one thing.
The witness of the weeping woman’s gray eyes, the melancholy lady who watched me take his book.
Leonor’s meditative pity as she dwelt upon the weeping woman gave me hope that she, finally, might fill the reader’s gap.
Leonor spoke.
—She wasn’t looking, Leonor concluded with the superior wisdom of women.
She was looking at her grief: not you.
And it struck me then that it was true.
The slight damp mound bordered by flowers in the lanzones hill in the exile paradise of Talisay—it was the width and measure of a child. An infant’s wildflower tomb. The hut was the burial grave: there where he had abandoned his aborted novel, her still child lay.522
517 Various commentators have already noted this error: Pasong Tamo is more likely the first battle, when the soldiers of drunken Matandang Leon were surprised by the veterana soldiers near Tandang Sora’s farm; it was days later that Bonifacio fled to Balara. Why Raymundo persists in this error is obvious: he was losing his mind, drowning in his excrement and being lapped by dogs in the G.I. prisons of Bilibid, damn damn damn damn etc. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
518 Raymundo seems to conflate two incidents here, the “feasts” before the Cry of Balintawak, and the haphazard rustling-cum-butchering of stray animals and other forms of theft during the starvation-ridden, swamp-swimming escapades of the rebels as they ran and hid from the Guardia Civil. In truth, between battles many of the rebels went back to their hometowns, kind of going on recess, to resume their duties as tax collector or plowman, and rejoined the war kapag tumawag ang himagsikan: when revolution called. A grueling schedule, and honestly few could hack it; some just stayed home, hiding with their carabaos, which by then were dying of the rindpest, an incidental plague that also contributed to the failure of the rebels’ war. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
519 Some say the host of the revolutionaries in the days leading to revolt was the old lady Tandang Sora, a generous farmer; others say it was some unnamed gentleman with a huge granary near what is now Quezon City. Here, Raymundo adds his two cents. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
520 Sure enough, outside Manila, in Cavite, they ate him up alive. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
521 Una maga maldita (Trans. Note)
522 Austin Coates, the most empathic and elegant among Rizal’s many biographers, notes that in Talisay in 1895 “[Josephine] gave birth to a stillborn child—a boy. It would seem that at the time of the shock, no one was in the house except for Maria’s [Rizal’s sister’s] infant son . . . in any event help came, and Rizal was able to do what was necessary to save her life. The same night he took the tiny body of his son and went alone to a secluded part of the vale, where he dug a grave and buried it, so concealing the place before returning to the house that no one ever knew where it was.” (Trans. Note)