Entry #46
And rising up to the balconies, a touch of spring, an infusion of scents and heat. On leaning out, she saw the figure of the young nephew of the assistant priest. His name was Ysagani. The young man passed, their eyes met, she smiled, the young man raised his hat. Cecilia [Marcela] felt a blaze in her cheeks, wished to withdraw, her feet would not move, she strove to look indifferent, but her eyes looked down upon the garden the better to watch him as he walked away.526
[This lay upside down in folder, typed:]
If only he had witnessed the slight strain as she gazed, the way she bent to look down with too forward a glance: a movement scandalous, one must admit, for the innocent citizens of the town of Pili—so that she was lucky only a blind bee and a few oblivious gumamelas witnessed her bold regard. But alas, his own vision was not perfect. At times, straight lines appeared wavy, and some objects appeared in the wrong shape or size. For instance, once he attempted to open up his straw hat like an umbrella, and at odd moments he mistook flocks of birds for banners with written messages, saying fragmentary things in foreign languages, like sic transit or glory be, and in one hallucinatory incident after a locust storm, he had actually picked up the fallen pests, believing he was gathering bullets for the war. The war was always on his mind anyhow.
Cecilia felt a vague infantile irritation with herself. What? Was she enamored of this nephew of a priest who used to criticize with enormous hauteur the comings and goings of old friends?
It’s true that the pusillanimity of her father and the ambitions of her mother had separated Cecilia from the townsfolk of Pili. She had passed her childhood with her aunt in Manila, her mother’s sister, the famed lawyer Doña Orang, she of the unbending views on virtue and love. Ever since she could remember, Cecilia had spent only two or three days a year in Pili, during its fiesta.527 When she was young, her father Kapitan Panchitong had been reluctant to send her to school, because the expenses incurred for educating her brother were heavy losses he already regretted. Her mother Kapitana Barang thus sacrificed her own maternal pleasures for material ones, giving up her only daughter, and through the years of her daughter’s absence, little by little, bit by bit, Barang had managed to silence and kill what remained of a mother’s tenderness, which used to catch at her throat at times, like a poor man’s scarf.
[This crossed out in bold pencil, still surprisingly legible:]
Ysagani, on the other hand, was the seed of unsung troubadours, the type his young country never failed to abandon, so his uncle, a romantic coadjutor who would never rise to vicar, would say, with the extravagance of certain off-putting, gregarious men. Ysagani, like Cecilia, knew not his mother nor his father, though perhaps he had better reason: they were dead. Unlike Cecilia, he had spent his youth in Pili, growing up in its fruit groves, its streams full of fish and washerwomen, its fresh lake breezes, its crafty geology of hills and caves. In his small area of ambition, he had built his own renown, gaining public advantages for his fine calligraphy, his skill at memorizing entire swaths of Tagalog poetry or Spanish legal phrases, his quick, flowing hand, and the ability to develop a mustache with brooding panache. People sought this distinguished-looking but rather mute youth to write out their documents, encode their love affairs, and all in all provide a satisfying means of expressing their most secret, binding, and lawful or illicit desires, albeit through the counterfeit of his gracious pen.
There was no doubt: Cecilia was interested in this young man, of whom she had heard even while in Manila. Cecilia had been educated by her formidable aunt. The society of that extraordinary woman, the lady lawyer Orang, an opinionated lady who could play men’s games, and the world of the chosen in which Doña Orang moved, formed the habits and graces of her young niece: Cecilia’s strong character and imagination. It was Doña Orang, when her ward came of age, who created the image of the ideal, the type of man whose virtues the fantasies of severe virgins sculpted out of whole cloth. Thus, Cecilia had imagined an idol contemplated by the single-minded inquietude of her unmarried aunt. He would possess the rarest qualities of brilliant men. Valor, youth, generosity, heroism, and disinterest were his natural attributes; and the result was that, when she woke to reality and heard her suitors’ bleating pastoral phrases and witnessed their vulgar acts, she would close her eyes and smile secretly to herself, a bittersweet smile: she would close her eyes as if to sleep, the better to dream a virgin’s dreams. The richest youths of the best families were not men enough to rouse her from her illusions. It was to him, the taciturn figure of Ysagani, enigmatic, silent, and incomprehensible, that she would entrust her destiny and confide her lasting hopes.
[This written on reverse of previous sheet, atypical:]
Ysagani crossed the garden with no more thought of the girl on the balcony. He knew who she was—la señorita. Señorita Cecilia, the urbanite, the Manila girl who had abandoned Pili for the distractions of an education in the city. Every year, during the week of fiesta, he would hear of her comings and goings—the flurry of preparations in her father’s home before the stranger-daughter returned; the pageantry of the arrival of the horse-drawn carriage, fancier in haunch and style than that of even Father Agaton’s carrosas; and the sad annual replications of the family’s introductions to their changeling child, who grew up to be (by all accounts) as whimsical in spirit as her imperious aunt. When news had come the month before that the señorita would be arriving in clothes of mourning, this time without her benefactor, Ysagani heard without comment the speculations and rumors about the young woman’s newly bestowed wealth, her unbelievable good fortune, and the host of young men from the best families of the walled city (and beyond) who vied for her lavish hand. All this was nothing to the youth, whose only thought was to return to his uncle’s rooms, to sit in the company of that most angelic of man-made implements, the Minerva press. Even its name was mythological, befitting its intransigent gifts.
As she watched his figure disappear into his home, across from hers, near the parish priest’s convent, she imagined she saw him dragging his feet up a steep mountain amid pale shades, or dancing and smiling yet laden with anxiety and the dread impulse of a powerful will. She looked away from this disagreeable picture and fixed again on the fading image in her mind of taciturn Ysagani, enigmatic, silent, and incomprehensible. Farther up the summit, sitting like a sovereign, he seemed an imposing figure, menacing with his feet those crawling on the ground, disdainful and arrogant like a triumphal lord.
She closed her eyes and smiled, a bittersweet smile.
“That is a man,” she thought.
[This handwritten in green ink:]
Ysagani climbed up to his small room with its spectral windows. Even the capiz shells were decayed—cracked, opaque lozenges, some warped vitreous slivers sliding out from their wooden panels like so many stiff eyelids opening into a void. He always kept the windows shut, not minding the heat or the representation of a subtle entombment in the wood-lined room’s enclosed coffin air. He preferred to minister to the machine in complete privacy, away from all the prying eyes of Pili, which were not inconsiderable, mind you—his uncle was the least dangerous of them, but even he, despite the touching depths of his love, did not look with favor on his nephew’s obsession. In fact, he refused to speak of it at all. The young man took off his hat, exchanged his jusi shirt for his cotton camisa, took off his pants, and strung upon his languid waist his limp calzoncillos, and in a minute he was on the floor, cranking up the machine.
She saw the flowers of her country lime-washed in blue and red pots, arrayed in a line along a wide balustrade that ended in a low wall on the edge of a small canal, which served to irrigate the garden. Thin reeds crowned with eggshells to protect them from rain gladdened the flowers, adding a ghost touch to the roses and leaves: the cactus flourished, growing large and white flowers that compensated for the ugliness of its stalk, and the Easter flower tinted its branches a crimson red. By a natural course of thought, from the blush of spring flowers Cecilia dwelt on her new life in Manila: her dear aunt had left, upon her death, an immense fortune, sums of money in several banks and estates that, upon her coming of age, would fall upon her to nurture, just as the gardener tended this sweet arbor.
[This handwritten in pencil, with letter doodling in margins:]
He cranked the Minerva both with his foot and his right hand. He understood that some of these machines could now be run by electricity, in those countries favored by a crude optimism; Ysagani himself could not imagine the act of printing without the pressure of his moving hand and the slow prophetic pedal of his reverent feet. He preferred to imagine the atoms of his own rather lugubrious (even he had to admit) body transferred into the formerly sleeping machine. Now it was awake to an awkward clacking, to a clunking and pedantic rhyme. The sounds of the machine were a bit hoary, no matter how he oiled—a hoarse onomatopoeia of tongues. That, too, he believed, was a blessing, not a curse. It provided music of distraction that prevented the calumnies of the outside world from penetrating his dominion. It kept from him the shrill neighing horses of the Guardia Civil. It shut out the indecent shouts of Father Agaton in the convent next door, cursing out his maligned maid, the pitiful Anday. It kept him from the poor miserable weeping of the abject and cursed Anday. It shielded him from the dueling novenas among the ignorant women of the various Legions of Mary and the ignoble prayers of their rivals, the Sodalists of Mary, gathered in the vestibule of the church beside his home. It kept at bay the daily lashings and the boyish wails from the latinidad across the plaza—the harsh rewards of education in an enlightened land. It silenced the vacuous roar of the cockfight, the murderous chaos of masculine games, and the street hawker’s melancholy ardor on dismal and sleepy afternoons. And it muffled the beating of his vengeful heart.
Voice.
Cecilia heard it and wished to withdraw.
It was Father Agaton, the parish priest. The Curate, as they called him, had free entry not only to all the homes of Pili but also to the private chambers of those homes.
Even before he appeared, she shivered with disgust.
—What beautiful flowers you have, he said from the garden below.
[This lay uspide down in folder, typed:]
Once a week or so he came up to crank up the press and so complete his project. He had to do this in spurts and starts, not knowing which day of week would be free, or when someone would call him out for some emergency hackery, for his work as the town’s unofficial secretary, calligrapher, and designated lover (at least in pen) demanded a laborious mimicry of others’ lives that exhausted him. Acts of translation were the worst. He always ended up duplicating the same sorry yearnings, as if all of humanity were the same depressing series of endless desire, and every man’s wish seemed the theft of another’s. He could not wait to get back to the halting progress of his machine. It was the typographic process, to Ysagani, that seemed always a reinvention, not just eternal but constantly novel, and every time he began printing, the product seemed unutterably strange.
Leaning out the balcony above the little arbor filled with flowerpots and hanging trellises of disparate forms, Cecilia wished to distract her thoughts from the apprehension of the Curate’s voice: again, she looked upon the flowers—but now their freshness only reminded her that they were destined to be raised to praise the priest at the Lenten mass.
—Tuktukan!
Down below she heard the cries of the town of Pili, from the galleries and playgrounds the mob cries of men in duels marked the time of fiesta. While the fathers played with their fortune in the cockpits, the sons with a sense of admirable proportion played with eggs. The only difference was that in the cockfight, the disgraced lost money, while in the childish battle of eggs the winner gained absolute power over the vanquished. She reflected: this follows history, as Darwin noted. In infant nations, the weak become slaves; while among older systems, the loser only pays her fine, and each citizen has control even over her corpse: such logic is the law of nature.528 529
[This lay upside down in folder, typed:]
Everytime he began printing, the product seemed unutterably strange. And even as, at his feet, he contemplated the work he had already done, a thickening bulk that seemed at times autobiographical and sometimes fanciful, and at some points historical and factual, though admittedly partial (and then maybe to some degree hysterical, not in the meaning of comedy but of pathology, but then, he hoped, not indubitably so), he couldn’t help reading it as if it were the first time.
And then the oracular machine, which sideways looked (he thought) like a Cyclops’s eye, a one-wheeled wonder of Ysagani’s mechanical times, scrawled out the next page:
love my father’s yellow stream buttnaked green coconut open to surprise cuckoldroaches-dancing-in-a-cone Porkrind-Chronicles saltweep of fish Emilia Christmas lights Padre Mariano Gomez (r.i.p.) my gonads! indios Jorge Raymundo Mata scabs lanzones deeply ripe mangoes navel-orange thighs
[end of Raymundo Mata’s papers]
526 My flesh moves toward twilight, or is it a kaingin shadow, and I note a few odd details, amid my hallucinations: Cecilia and Ysagani, the couple in Makamisa, she of the unimaginable wealth and he—well, so it is said Rizal never finished that novel, if one might call those fragments a book, and in fact couldn’t decide on the couple’s names (he sometimes called Cecilia Marcela, and Ysagani Crispin) and before we could foretell any part of that young nephew of a curate’s fate, the story ends in blurry aporia—a nimbus of truncated folios, erasures, abandoned revisions. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
527 Dear Mimi C., before I regress into my astasic inertia: enclosed herewith is Rizal’s third novel, Makamisa (after the Mass, as one might say in English), a mix of Tagalog and Spanish, rediscovered in parts and translated—by a Benedictine—or was it Augustinian—my memory’s failing—anyway, some scholar in monkish garb. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
528 I’m reading through the text Estrella Espejo offered me. I read here this passage from Brother Ambeth Ocampo’s careful transmission of Makamisa, which the Benedictine monk believes was the last in the trilogy of Rizal’s novels. The following is from fol. 70, the original version in Rizal’s hand and “discovered” by the monk in 1986 in a mislabeled folder in the National Library: “. . . La unica diferencia era que en la lucha de gallos el desgraciado perdia su dinero, mientras que en la lucha de los huevos el vencido pasaba a poder del vencedor. Cuestion de historia como diria Darwin: en la infancia de los [naciones la] pueblos el debil [era] pasaba a ser esclavo; entre las naciones viejas se paga la indemnizacion y cada uno se queda con sus cadaveres: la logica es la ley de la naturaleza.” Mimi C.—what do you think? May I have your cell phone number? Let’s talk. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines)
529 There is indeed resemblance between Rizal’s Spanish and Raymundo Mata’s English. Though one might attribute the modern allusion to Darwin to the latter text, it’s clear here that the long-entombed and antique Rizal was the original modernist. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)