Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

Mene, Thecel, Phares

DO NOT TOUCH me. I have no words left.

Joseph stared at the words he’d written on the slate, but he could not remember writing them. He sat as still as the grave, watching the jaundiced afternoon sun filter through his garret’s only window.

In the distance, he could see the lights from the dirigible towers, coming to life. A Locomotive Aerostatique was approaching the city, floating through the sky like a giant inflated spleen. Against the dying light, the airship was a monstrous shadow, an ominous black egg hatching weary crowds of nameless, faceless people, heroes and dragon fodder alike.

Joseph hated Berlin at this dreary hour. When the Angelus came, the steam turbines discharged the day’s effluence into the upper atmosphere, turning the soft pink of twilight into a muddy river of gray. But of course this was Königreich Preußen, he thought, and there was no Angelus – just the sharp burst of cannon fire at 1800, signaling the end of the working day.

“EXPERIENCE TEACHES US, no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.”

– Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677)

JOSEPH WAS BETWEEN lives. His family had spent big money to exile him to the University of Heidelberg.

“You need to further your studies,” his father had ordered. “Stop this malas writing business. I did not grow this old to bury my children.”

A post-doctorate was certainly important and prestigious, but the two of them knew why he’d really been sent away.

In his previous existence (the one he knew was his true calling), Joseph had been a writer – a man of the word, full of dreams and reckless hope. He was from the privileged class, but his Scientific Romances – The Social Cancer and The Reign of Greed – had given indios, rich and poor alike, a voice. His books, written under the nom de plume ‘Señor Laong Laan’, were printed and spread in secret by partisan friends and propagandists, stoking a movement for independence that spread swiftly across the islands, like a virulent disease.

The Church and the Spanish Crown burned over his incendiary stories. Joseph’s wealthy family had been in trouble before, and now they feared for his life. They knew that a garrote’s noose waited, if Joseph’s identity was ever discovered.

One evening, in the season of spawning catfish, his father’s men spirited him away. Press-ganged from a zarzuela performance, the young man was placed on a clipper-steamer to Europe. Sailing over troubled monsoon seas, Joseph found himself lost and suddenly alone. He had left without the benefit of a single goodbye.

Two months after he arrived, Joseph quit school and fled to Berlin. In the Prussian capital, he lived on the modest funds his family had sent, and tried again and again to write.

“Reino de España has now blocked all non-official communication to Las Islas Felipenas,” an old friend, Ferdinand Blumenttrit, warned him. “The word is that open rebellion has broken out. The adventures of a fictional hero, Jose Rizal, are the movement’s inspiration. Thus far they have not identified their true author, but beware, mein bruder.” The professor warned him that the Reino de España had eyes everywhere. The Spanish Count of Benomar and his political agents were intercepting the electro-grams and pneumatic mail of exiles.

As a noted member of the Ethnography establishment, his old friend used his influence to secure him membership at the Berliner Gesellschaft für Ethnologie. There, they used the Society’s Babbage brain to encrypt their correspondence, with a cipher of Joseph’s making.

Otherwise cut off from his old world, Joseph had grown increasingly restless and despondent, visiting every brothel and bierbrauerie that he could afford, trying to drown his sorrows, while keeping as low a profile as possible. There was a great emptiness in his heart, a gnawing that he did not, or perhaps would not, understand.

Something in the void, in the naked darkness called out to him, but his words could give it no shape. The spirit that compelled him to put pen on paper remained stilled and silent.

“THE BABAYLAN PRIESTS of the ancient indios were, in a sense, like Newtonian physicists. They subscribed to the philosophical position called determinism, which posited that, for everything that happened, there existed conditions that could cause no other event.

This was the only possible way that a babaylan’s predictions could come true. A person’s destiny had to have already been cast at birth, molded and finished from the clay of possibility. For how else could the future be correctly predicted, if men and women could affect the present to change it?”

– Joseph Mercado, The Collected Berlin Letters (1946).

AT THE SOUND of the twilight cannon, Joseph shook himself from his brooding. He polished off a bottle of Vin Mariani and left his room.

The young man rushed downstairs to catch the end of the public visiting period – the only time the Society allowed people with Class C Memberships within its premises.

“Guten abend, Signore Mercado,” his landlady greeted, as he passed her along the hallway. Mrs. Francesca von Kusiemski was the Italian widow of an Austrian lawyer, and the proprietor of the only boarding house that took in colored people. “If you are going out this late, it is best you wear protection.”

She held up to her face a gilded mask in the form of Caravaggio’s Medusa, and batted her long, goat-hair eyelashes. “The haze outside brings progress, but ugh! It smells of witches and burning rubber. Uffa! Now I must drink radium tonic for my health.”

Joseph bowed, and the wind-up mechanism inside his bowler tipped itself, bobbing like the head of a cattle egret. He thanked Frau von Kusiemski for the timely reminder, and hurried back to his room.

The young man wondered if his landlady’s eyes were on him as he walked away. He always seemed to catch her looking in his direction. His lodging mates, mulattos from Deutsch-Ostafrika, often referred to her as ‘Mrs. Hill’, after the heroine of John Cleland’s novel. They whispered that she would readily trade a week’s rent for certain manly services, and the more exotic the man, the better.

Joseph didn’t know how he felt about this. The widow was a shade past forty and by no means beautiful, but she had always been very kind to him. His funds were not being replenished, and a part of him wondered what he would do, if the rumors about her turned out to be true.

The young man returned to his quarters, and retrieved the Stenhouse Lung Protector Professor Blumenttrit had sent him. After replacing the used filter, he pulled the respirator’s elastic behind his ears. The featureless mask of plain white celluloid covered his entire face, protecting him from the foul air outside.

For a few seconds he stood in front of the mirror, contemplating his pale weiß visage. The mask’s anonymity was strangely comforting. Often, Joseph wished he didn’t have to remove his mask. Everywhere he went, people stared at him. Without his mask’s protection, the city’s xenophobic populace would peer from windows or point, as he walked past, whispering, “fremde, außerirdische, ausländer, Asiaten, Japaner, Chinesischer mann, Korean mann” – anything but his own ethnicity.

Of course, no one ever said anything. Orientals, especially the rich Chinese and Japanese, were nominally considered equals. His manners and good breeding meant he was frequently mistaken for their kind. Joseph knew, though, that in their heart of hearts, they considered all colored people untermenschen, the unmentionable ‘under-men’ of the world. He could sense the hauteur behind the eyes of every painted courtesan he slept with.

He wondered if his landlady would feel the same way, if he ever found himself in her bed. At best, he thought, she would look at him as an exotic curiosity – a meal of rice instead of potatoes – at worst, he might simply be an occasion for her charity.

“A GOLD DEATH mask, found in Oton, Iloilo, was the oldest mask ever found in the Philippines. It has been dated by archaeologists to between 1300 and 1400 of the Common Era.

Like all masks, the delicately-shaped metal face hid the identity of its wearer, but captured the culture of the tribe that used it. When worn while a person was alive, it created a new identity from the tribe’s spirit world. In death, it served the opposite purpose. The mask prevented spirits from entering the body of the deceased – thus serving, instead, to protect identity.

Because all masks function as touchstones of cultural memory, a blank mask serves no purpose, and carries no meaning.”

– Francisco Pölzl, Die Maske des Kampfes (1926)

AT THE BERLINER Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, he greeted the machine’s teletype attendant, an elderly Jew, who punched his details into the room-sized mechanical computer. Joseph was not in the mood for conversation. To avoid small talk, he stepped away and browsed the flickering displays.

The Library’s Remote Projection Kinetoscopes were arranged in a circular, flower-like shape, held aloft by a mechanism that resembled an iron octopus. The numerous postcard-sized screens cycled images from the book Art Forms in Nature, by the artist and biologist Earnest Haeckel – orchids, diatoms, echinoderms, and all manner of strange and beautiful creatures.

In the center of the iron flower, a large urn-sized screen displayed text from Haeckel’s philosophical treatise, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, where he elaborated on the notion that the physical characteristics of a species determined its place in the order of nature.

Joseph turned away from the screen. For a second, he thought to himself that this was why he needed to return to Manila. He needed – all indios needed – to succeed as a people, and prove Haeckel and his kind wrong.

He closed his eyes to better hear the steam generator outside, growling like an Old-Testament god. That was the sound of progress, of technology, he thought. It was a sound that divided the world into two.

The ill feeling came and went. Joseph sighed deeply, and refused to feed his train of thought any further.

He left the displays, and began to peruse the junk mail on the bureaux plat. There were several catalogues for Dresden porcelain, ads for Luftbad sanitariums in Bavaria, a testimonial by Alexandré Dumàs for the coca-leaf tonic Vin Mariani, and a flyer from a store that sold nothing but maps and atlases. A cryptic message was printed on the back of its quaint, do-it-yourself map brochure:

 

“The lines that separate people are always artificial, as unnatural to men and women as they are to the birds overhead. As an author, what kind of country will you create?”

– Mr. Strabo, proprietor of Here Be Dragons

 

“Herr Mercado?” the attendant called out, interrupting his train of thought. “I believe this is what you have come for.”

The old man handed him a pile of generic advertising materials.

Joseph thanked the attendant and was preparing to leave, when a sudden roar of laughter stopped him.

“It is best that you go, jung mann,” the old man said, as he adjusted the card feeder on the multiplex Baudot teletype. “In the next room, the Society is entertaining the polygenist Dr. Karl Vogt and some American students of the late Louis Agassiz. They’ve brought with them their Human Zoo.”

The attendant re-arranged the actuators on the Brain’s switchboard, and a new set of pictures appeared on the Kinetoscopes: a pair of orangutans, a Samoan couple, a pair of Nubians, and two diminutive Aetas from Joseph’s own island of Luzon. On the big center screen was a Hottentot Venus, a young Khoikhoi woman with large buttocks and unusual elongated genitals. The unfortunate men and women were exhibited naked, in the famous pose of Vitruvian man. The orangutans, however, had been carefully dressed in the latest Prussian fashion.

“Your generic Asian features will pique their interest,” the old Jew warned. “Unless you want to be poked and prodded in the name of Science, you had best leave.”

“My family is rich,” Joseph muttered reflexively, as he walked out of the Head-End. “The rules don’t apply to those with money.”

Joseph retrieved his mask, hat, and coat, and returned to his lodgings. He disposed of the junk mail, save for a large fold-out map of Bavaria. He opened the illustrated pages carefully – at the center was a stiff card, containing the decrypted message from Professor Blumenttrit.

 

Mein Bruder Joseph,

As we discussed last time, I have made arrangements for you to seek refuge at the Wolpertinger Luftbad sanitarium, outside Minga. Berlin is no longer safe.

Anastasius Lebenskünstler is an old friend, and he will take you under his protection.

His freikörperkultur philosophy will seem unusual or possibly even mad, but I guarantee it will strip you of what clouds your mind. It is my hope that, after this trip, you will no longer need to hide behind your usual masks. I am sure you will find your true destiny.

The directions to his place are indicated below. Best of luck, my young friend, and keep safe. This will be our last communication until you return to Berlin.

Sincerely yours,

Ferdinand @ Litoměřice

“THERE IS AN ancient Tagalog legend about why the natives of the Philippines have short noses. It was said that Bathala, the chief of the Tagalog gods, sent a balangay boat carrying noses for every person in the world. Because the natives had short legs, they couldn’t get to the shore fast enough. They were left with the squished, flat noses at the bottom of the hold.

To this day, Filipinos feel inferior to people from other lands, because of their flat noses and their short stature. In Philippine legend, morphology equals destiny.”

– Dolores del Mundo, An Analysis of Guadencio V. Aquino’s ‘Philippine Myths and Legends’ (2010)

A FEW DAYS later, Joseph was on a Locomotive Aerostatique bound for Minga, the capital of Königreich Bayern. From there, he boarded a Rail Zeppelin to Dießen am Ammersee, a few miles southwest of the city.

The young man alighted at a tiny train station, lost in the thick of the woods. Dießen am Ammersee was a tiny hamlet near the shores of an ancient glacier lake. The Wolpertinger Luftbad sanitarium lay some distance away from the village, in the very heart of a great Bavarian forest.

The grassy path was completely deserted, save for a lonely milk cart pulled by two large dogs. During his walk, he spied no steam engines, only windmills and the giant sun-catching cones of solar concentrators, discreetly hidden among the expansive trees. The air was crisp, clean, and pure. Berlin already seemed a world away.

After hiking for three-quarters of an hour, Joseph finally reached his destination. Professor Lebenskünstler’s picture-perfect property stood by the shores of the bluest lake he had ever seen, nestled snugly between the proverbial loins of a small alpine hill.

He walked up to the front door, and pulled the bell. After a few minutes, he heard laughter and the sound of softly-padded footsteps approaching.

The door opened, and Joseph was startled to see a beautiful young woman munching a red apple. She stood in front of him, naked as Mother Eve in that fatal second when she tasted the bitter Fruit of Knowledge.

“Susmariosep! I – I’m so sorry. I must be in the wrong house. I – I will take my leave,” he stammered, as his face turned a shade three times redder than her apple. He bowed out of instinct, and his automatic hat tipped itself as usual. For some reason, the spring jammed, and his bowler moved up and down repeatedly, making a series of small, embarrassing sounds before stopping in the ‘up’ position.

He apologized profusely, and to avoid further humiliation (as well as the overwhelming visage of the girl’s perfect form), he quickly trained his eyes toward the cottage’s peaked roof.

“Guten tag. Herr Mercado, I presume?” she asked. The young woman stared at Joseph with much amusement, before looking up toward where her guest’s gaze had been strangely riveted. She craned her neck in an exaggerated manner, as if to call attention to Joseph’s embarrassment. Then she took another bite of her succulent fruit. “Welcome to the Wolpertinger Luftbad sanitarium,” she said. “The professor has been waiting for you. Will you not come in?”

Joseph stood still for a while, trying to make some sense of the situation. Did he send me all this way to clear my mind in a bordello? he wondered silently. I could have done the same in Berlin and spent far less money.

The young man nodded politely, but kept his vision trained to the rafters. He searched in vain for the discreet red lantern that beckoned lonely souls from the dark seas of continence, but there was nothing there, save for a few potted petunias in need of watering.

He stepped inside and was led to a drawing room, decorated by a multitude of statuary and paintings, all of which featured the nude as subject matter. The woman excused herself and went to find Professor Lebenskünstler.

Joseph took off his hat, and fixed its mechanism. Feeling overdressed, he removed his coat as well. As he waited, more people passed through the common drawing room: two strapping young men and a quinquagenarian lady shepherding a group of children. Despite the fact that Joseph was Oriental, all of them greeted him warmly – and, like the art on the walls, all of them were stark naked.

Perhaps this isn’t a bordello, Joseph worried. It’s a bedlam or some manner of pagan cult. Dios ko po, what manner of horror did my old friend get me into?

The young woman returned and ushered Joseph into a well-appointed study, bursting with books.

Dr. Anastasius Lebenskünstler had been eagerly expecting him all afternoon. Like everyone else, the sixty-year old professor was dressed in Father Abraham’s livery. His thick body was muscular and solid for his age. Apart from browned cheeks and stray liver spots, his skin was as youthfully white as pork fat.

Joseph averted his eyes once more, to avoid staring at the professor’s sehr große scrotum. He wondered if his own father’s cojones were as big and as wrinkled, realizing that he had never seen his father naked.

“Delighted to meet you, Herr Mercado,” the professor said, gripping the young man’s hand with a hearty handshake. “Professor Blumenttrit has told me so much about you. I do apologize for meeting you like this. We were on our way out.”

“Entschuldigung sie, you are going out? Like that?” Joseph asked, flustered. Despite being a doctor of medicine, he was extraordinarily uncomfortable being in the presence of so many unclothed strangers.

“Yes, we are having a swim by the lake,” the old man answered patiently. “Didn’t Professor Blumenttrit tell you that I’m a doctor of freikörperkultur? Mein Gott, you look like you’re going to faint.”

“Herr Professor, I beg your indulgence,” Joseph said. “The Locomotive Aerostatique from Berlin was very crowded, and I have come such a long way. Would you mind it very much if I just retired to my room to rest?”

“No, no, of course not,” the professor bellowed. “But only on the condition that you join us for dinner at 1800.”

“Do you dress for dinner?” Joseph asked nervously.

“Bavarians are not savages; of course we dress for dinner,” he guffawed. “Klara here will bring you to your quarters,” he said, pointing to the young woman with the half-eaten apple.

“Herr Mercado, may I present you Fräulein Klara Pölzl, of Waldviertel in Austria,” the professor said, “Fräulein Klara, this is Herr Joseph Mercado from faraway Las Islas Felipenas. Can you kindly show him to his room?”

“I have heard much about you, Herr Mercado,” Klara said.

“Good things, I hope?” he asked, with some trepidation.

“Perhaps,” she answered coyly.

Klara bowed and motioned for Joseph to follow her. She said nothing more, as they walked out onto the path toward one of the guest cottages. Once they reached the rustic, ivy-covered hut, she offered a quick goodbye and left.

Joseph stared at the monastic simplicity of his new quarters. It was even more depressing than his garret in Berlin. The floor was made of clay bricks, and the walls were rough logs, hewn and pegged into place. There was a small fireplace, also made of brick, straw chairs, and a hard board for a bed. A thin mattress was spread on top, along with a pillow and a few quilts. A lonely washstand shared a corner with an old chamber pot. He felt a great panic come over him, and had to sit still for a second to calm down.

Afterward, Joseph went to the window and watched, as Klara walked toward the lake. When she disappeared from view, he opened his suitcase and took out his Stenhouse Lung Protector. He put on the white mask and, without bothering to get out of his clothes, succumbed to his personal demons.

After cleaning up, he dressed as comfortably as he could, and dove under the safety of the covers. For some reason, Joseph started to weep, and his tears didn’t let up until he finally fell asleep.

“SPINDLE WHORLS AND stone beaters to make bark cloth have been found in Philippine Neolithic assemblages from as early as 2,740 ACE. Written records of first contact, such as the Zhufan Zhi from the Song Dynasty, indicate that the clothing Filipinos wore served decorative or ritual purposes, rather than as a means of protecting modesty.”

– Francisco Pölzl, The Ferdinand C. Ashley Academic Journal of Ancient History, (1936)

DINNER WAS NOT altogether unpleasant. Joseph was pleased that everyone was appropriately attired. The food was rustic country fare: weißwurscht, head cheese and Brezen pretzels, finished with a syllabub of Bavarian cream, thickened with isinglass. In his honor, Professor Lebenskünstler had broken out some excellent silvaners of Franconian vintage.

The vintage of the dinner guests was another matter. A schoolteacher from the village asked him where in the Caribbean was Las Islas Felipenas. A tall, bearded poet from Hanover tried to converse with him about Plato’s Republic and the responsibilities of writers to the state.

Klara pulled him away, warning that the Hanoverian was an urning, one who would have gone Socratic on him in the worst possible way. Meanwhile, Professor Lebenskünstler lectured endlessly on social nudism, and how it promoted fairness and equality.

The Hanoverian sidled by him again. Joseph felt mildly uncomfortable, but did his best to conceal it.

“Do you know he is not really an academic?” the Hanoverian whispered conspiratorially.

“Do you mean Dr. Lebenskünstler?” Joseph asked.

“We call him ‘Professor’ and ‘Doctor’ out of respect,” the man said. “His mother was Catholic and made him choose between the priesthood and his inheritance. Naturally, he chose neither. Herr Lebenskünstler lives for books and he is very learned. Sadly, he never actually completed his doctorate.”

“You seem to know a lot about him.”

“I make it my business to know things.”

“But do you believe in what the professor espouses?”

“Ha! If people move past the barrier of looks and race, we humans will find some new way to draw lines. Perhaps it will be wealth or maybe sexual preference.”

“If you are such a skeptic, why are you here?” Joseph asked.

“Ah, I myself am only sunning au naturel for my health,” the Hanoverian replied. “Wolpertinger Luftbad is cheaper than Italy.”

“I do not understand.”

“The things that separate one person from another are so rarely skin deep,” the poet noted, returning to his earlier point. “Do not tell me that is not the case as well, even in your distant islands?”

“My people are not like that. We are renowned for our friendliness and hospitality.”

“Your delightful apropos-of-nothing is the bottle of Bocksbeutel talking,” the Hanoverian quipped. “I’ll have you know, I notice that you flinch whenever I come near. Are you afraid, Herr Mercado, that I will look at you with the same male gaze that you look at Fraulein Klara there?”

“What? No!” Joseph exclaimed in indignation. “I would never –”

“There, you are drawing up a new caste system already. Perhaps you should stick to the local beer,” the man from Hanover suggested. “It will call far less attention to your charming naiveté. Good evening, Herr Mercado.”

“THE ARUMEN MANUVU of Cotabato believed that Ala-ta-Ala, the god of all gods, and Magbabaya, the creator, send messages to mankind through the gimokud, who were disembodied sacred souls. These spirits possessed the wali-an, the clairvoyant shamans of the Manuvu, who spoke the word of the gods.

They believed that people had no agency, unless moved by higher powers. This relegated the concept of free will to an insignificant position, something still common to the people of the islands to this very day.

‘Bahala na,’ Filipinos like to say. The gods would always provide.”

– Dolores del Mundo, Collected Papers (2012)

JOSEPH TRIED TO spend his time writing, in the quiet of his room. However, despite his attempt at self-isolation, the other guests insisted on inviting him to one activity after another. He played tennis with the Nordic-looking youths he’d met at the drawing room. The schoolteacher brought him to see the village of Dießen am Ammersee. The Hanoverian introduced him to some mawkish English writers of the Uranian persuasion. He indulged all of them, but always, always, he kept his clothes on.

Klara had also come to call. She invited him for a picnic by the lake on the occasion of his third afternoon at the sanitarium. Much as Joseph was attracted to her, no words could persuade him to join her in the altogether.

“At least leave your coat and that silly hat behind,’ she insisted. “What have you to hide?”

Joseph smiled awkwardly and just shrugged his shoulders, flattered that she showed him some interest. He was usually very talkative and loved to dominate conversations. But with Klara, he seemed to run out of words.

When they reached the shore of the lake, the young woman turned toward him and unbuttoned his shirt to the waist. Joseph was too paralyzed to protest. He ate a simple meal of sausages and sweet potatoes, in his camisa de chino undershirt. Afterward, the smell of her skin and the softness of her touch lingered in his thoughts for hours.

“EVEN UNDER THE guise of magic and tradition, the ancient Filipinos had some rudimentary knowledge of genetics and the selection of phenotypes. This was evidenced by the sacred camote (sweet potato) rituals of Samar and Leyte.

After a field was burned and cleared, tubers were taken from a fruitful old field, and the farmers waited for the full moon, to plant. They needed a waxing orb, so that the sweet potatoes would become very smooth. If there were lots of stars out during the planting, this meant that the camote would be numerous and all joined together.

Before the planting was done, a young couple made love in the field, and the young man offered his first seed to Lakambakod, the protector of crops. Planting naked ensured that the camote skins would be thin. After that, the man made the woman ride on his back, as he planted the rest of the tubers. It was believed that this would increase the chances of the tubers overlapping.

From an ethnobotanical perspective, this shows the complex relationship between Filipinos, their cosmological system, and the plants they grew. They knew that while a sweet potato would always be a sweet potato, there were many ways to influence the final form it could grow into.”

– Ferdinand Blumenttrit, Philippine Journal of Science (1910)

ON HIS FIFTH day at Wolpertinger, Joseph noticed a large pile of logs stacked not far from his cabin. He asked the housekeeper what they were for.

“They are for back-up steam devils,” the woman answered, as she hitched her dogs to a milk cart. “Sometimes there is not enough sunshine for the collectors. The professor needs to find someone to chop them into firewood.”

“I could do it,” Joseph offered. “I used to chop wood as a child.”

“Herr Mercado,” the housekeeper chuckled, as she picked up her distaff and a basket of wool, for spinning. “Danke, but that would be difficult if not impossible for a young man of your frame and stature. Besides, you are a guest here.”

“A non-paying one,” he muttered. Here in Europe, I am a pauper and a weakling.

“Anyway, it is good you sought me out,” she added. “It saves me the trouble of looking for you. The professor has asked that you come by his study, anytime you are free today.”

Joseph thanked the housekeeper, and went over to the main house.

“Professor Lebenskünstler?” Joseph asked, as he knocked on the heavily-carved study door. A large wooden owl stared at him, as it sat on a reproduction of Spinoza’s Ethics. A small banner curled around its taloned feet, bearing the words: ‘ut legitur, et illuminamini’ – to read is to be enlightened.

The old man bade him come in. As Joseph had expected, the good doctor was sitting in his armchair, comfortably naked.

“How is your rest?” the professor asked. “I trust you have not been too uncomfortable.”

“I am sleeping just fine,” Joseph replied, “and everyone has been unexpectedly – welcoming.”

“Wolpertinger is an oasis of sanity,” the old man said. “This is neither Madrid nor Berlin.”

“I am grateful for that.”

“Think of this as a kreislauf – that is an old Bavarian word, for a bout of mental rest.”

“It has been all that and more, thank you.”

“You are most welcome. Professor Blumenttrit has told me that Berlin is crawling with the men of Conde de Benomar. It is best that you stay here with us for a while.”

“I had actually expected to join Professor Blumenttrit at Litoměřice.”

“No, that is not a wise idea,” the professor warned. ”Our mutual friend is a known agitator. There will be many agents watching him all the time.”

“I realize that, sir,” Joseph sighed.

“Well, you are certainly safer here. After Leopold failed to win the Spanish crown, Bavaria has been no friend of Spain. The good count will have trouble placing his men.”

“Did Professor Blumenttrit tell you why he wanted me to come here?”

“He only told me that you needed a place to think and to hide.”

“That is true. But why did he send me here in particular?”

“I am told that you are an author,” the professor remarked, ignoring Joseph’s question. “Yet Herr Blumenttrit has told me that you’ve stopped writing. Why is that?”

“I am – not sure. There was a time I couldn’t stop the words from flowing. Now I cannot even string a sentence together. At this rate, I will never write my third novel,” Joseph lamented.

“Perhaps the time for writing is done?” the professor asked.

“When I started, anger stirred my spirit,” Joseph continued. “My family was rich, and we were very comfortable. But in Las Islas Felipenas, even money was no protection. My family was persecuted. My brother was jailed for protesting a rice tax on the poor. If you were an indio, your life had no true value. You belonged – body and soul – to the Church and to the Crown.”

“Any one of those is a reason to take arms.”

“So you say. But reforms must come from above. A savage insurrection will only end in blood.”

“By ‘above’, you mean from the elites and intellectuals such as yourself? Is that why you chose to write stories instead?”

“Yes, I had sketched this idea for an alternate world – an alternate history, really – one without the distractions of our modern technology. I wrote a nested narrative about an author, who had also written a book about yet another fictional writer.”

“In my story,” Joseph went on, “a good man named Jose Rizal wanted to change the world, using only words as weapons. He wrote two imaginary books called Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, in which his protagonist, Crisostomo Ibarra, suffers great persecution from the church and state. In the end, however, Ibarra chooses peace over armed struggle. Rizal himself would be arrested and executed. His death would become the catalyst for a doomed revolution. My third book would have focused on the nobility of my people, on their inherent love for peace. I thought also of extrapolating future events, perhaps from a hundred years hence.”

“That sounds – interesting, if a bit too fantastical for my taste. I am curious as to why you wrote them as scientific romances,” the old man questioned. “Surely your message would have been more effective as proper, realist fiction?”

“Scientific romances are as marginalized as my people.” Joseph answered. “Realism is neurotically obsessed with itself. It offers no norms, nothing to reach for. I wanted to reach the masses, the common people who dream about better futures. Scientific romances are all about possibility, roads that move forward, not those that loop around in navel-gazing eternities.”

“Yet all fiction is permutation. There is always change.”

“Right now all I want is for us to be treated as equals, and have proper representation in the Cortes. The masses want revolution and blood. I need a third novel to correct this notion. Violence is never the answer.”

“There is a time and place for everything, even fighting” the professor insisted. “Your people are already taking your words and shaping their future with their own hands. Why would you change that?”

“What does it matter? I am a dead man, regardless. My two little books have caused great controversy, and my life now imitates my art. I am sure to end up like Rizal and face a firing squad. Although, if Benomar’s Hermandad ever found me out, they wouldn’t waste a bullet on an indio – they would simply break my neck.”

“So stay here,” the professor urged. “Write your other novel. Stay here and at least stay alive. Anyway, the ones who write eventually control the world.”

“That would be nice if it were true,” Joseph said. “You have treated me so well. I like it here. It’s so different from everywhere else. But – it can’t make up for what I’ve gone through, or the suffering of those I’ve left behind. This is just one place, one small thing.”

“You are right, of course. However, everything starts with just one small thing,” the old man mused. “The West has abused you and your people, but it has also sheltered and nurtured you. In my own limited way, I understand your conflict.”

“I am not sure I myself understand it.”

“And you have no wish to go back and fight?” the professor repeated. “As I said, a handful of your words have already lit the fires of revolution. That makes you an ideal leader.”

“I – I don’t know about that. Are you sure my friend said nothing, Herr Professor?” Joseph asked, not wanting to speak his mind further, or disrespect his host. “I am honestly not sure what I’m supposed to do here.”

“Well, he did ask me to tell you something else, something quite peculiar: ‘Mene, Thecel, Phares’. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Yes, I used it in my last book. It’s a crucial line from Rizal’s El Filibusterismo, but it was originally from the Book of Daniel,” Joseph explained. “It was a mysterious message left on the wall of King Belshazzar’s palace. One that he’d asked the prophet to interpret.”

“Hmm. I always thought the correct line was ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’,” Professor Lebenskünstler mused.

“Why did he tell you this? What did he mean by it?”

“I am afraid that was all he told me. I know of that phrase, though. It’s usually taken as an idiom.”

“Yes, it is,” Joseph sighed. “It means that the future is predetermined.”

“I refuse to believe that,” the old man said gruffly, “and neither should you. Seek shelter when necessary, yes. But make a decision on what you need to do. Do not bury your head in the sand forever.”

With that, the conversation ended. Joseph thanked his host once more, and returned to his room.

On the way back, he saw Klara playing tennis. Beautiful Klara, strange Klara, a woman with whom every tactile moment intimated infinity.

For some reason, Joseph felt the void calling for him again. He was seized by the same darkness he had felt in the brothels and bierbrauerie of Berlin. It was as if a great weight had suddenly pressed on his heart – the weight of a frozen life, the birth pains of a stillborn country, the infernal blackness of cities, and the oppressive insecurity of a brown body in a sea of infallible white.

He ran toward his cabin like a madman, stripping off his hat and clothes as he went. By the time he reached his quarters, he was completely naked. Joseph locked the door and shut the crinoline blinds. He jumped onto his bed and lost himself to the darkness. This time he did not cry.

THAT EVENING, JOSEPH skipped dinner. He slept fitfully, beset by troubled dreams.

 

I, Joseph Alonso y Mercado, found myself in an enormous library filled with nothing but books – books that different versions of myself, scattered infinitely through time and space, had always written. I saw thousands of volumes of poetry, historical annotations, meditations on women, language, moral values, mythology, pre-history, taxonomy, and others.

Feeling restless, I wandered about until I saw the shelves that held my precious novels. A great dread filled my soul, when I realized that all of them were just the same two books – The Social Cancer and The Reign of Greed, An Eagle Flight and The Filibustering, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo – different titles, but always the same pair, and nothing more. There never was and never would be a third novel.

Terrified, I ran toward a mirrored portal, and found myself at the entrance of a cave on the peak of a mystical mountain called Banahaw. Eleven heroes of old, of the future, and of myth waited for me, toasting lambanog toddy and Vin Mariani.

The begged me to lead them to battle, for I was a be-knighted National Hero, the greatest Medal of Honor which the Highest and Most Honorable Society of the Children of Las Islas Felipenas could bestow.

Feeling inauthentic and hollow, I ran back into the cave, which for some reason I knew would lead me to hell. I fell endlessly, surrounded by an iridescent rain of burning dreams, until I realized that I was not falling but flying. I was the Matanglawin, the great hawk of Philippine legend, whose eyes could see the ley lines of every possible future.

The voice of God boomed across the skies like a volley of cannon, and I discovered that God’s voice was my own. I was the Christian God, I was the indio Christ, and I was Bathala, the ancient God of the islands. I as God roared, and sent lightning and thunder through the Heavens. I shouted: “Mene, Thecel, Phares,” and then I finally understood the writing on the wall.

Do not touch me, I told Destiny. I shall choose my own Eternity.

“ANY LIFE IS made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.”

– Jorge Luis Borges, Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1774)

JOSEPH WOKE UP at the crack of dawn. He dressed and went to the main house for an early breakfast. The housekeeper told him she’d collected and washed the clothes he had so hastily discarded on the pathway. She also returned his abandoned hat, but the wind-up mechanism was now broken, and needed replacement.

After borrowing an axe, Joseph walked back to his cottage. As soon as he got inside, he stripped off his clothes and folded them neatly on the bed. He took his Stenhouse mask from his luggage and put it on tightly.

He stood by the door, his hand on the knob, working up the courage to open it. After a few minutes, he decided to brave the outside world.

Joseph’s first sensation was that of swimming, as if his body was slicing through the sea instead of the crisp mountain air. The feeling was heady and liberating, and he could not help but leap about like a child.

The young man walked over to where the pile of logs were kept, and started chopping them into smaller pieces. All morning and afternoon he worked, until everything was reduced to firewood. When he was done, he ran to the lake, threw his mask by the shore, and dove into the clear, lustral waters.

When he returned to land, a small crowd had gathered to see him – the professor and his housekeeper, the schoolmistress and her children, the Hanoverian poet and his English friends. Klara was there too, along with the two Nordic-looking youths.

Joseph hid behind a thin fringe of reeds. He lifted his eyebrows shyly at his curious onlookers. It was an unspoken greeting peculiar to his homeland, deep and pregnant with meaning. Unfortunately, it was completely lost on his European audience.

Klara handed him his mask. He put it back on and returned to his cabin. He wondered if any of them felt fremdschämen – that uniquely German word for the awkwardness one felt for another’s embarrassment.

At dinner, he announced that he would be leaving the very next day.

DEAREST READER, DEPENDING on who you are and what you read into this story, there are three possible endings.

Mene: God hath numbered thy kingdom, and hath finished it.

THE NEXT DAY, Joseph boarded the Locomotive Aerostatique to Berlin. His short stay at the sanitarium had somehow swept the fear and doubt from his deeply-troubled mind. Having steeled his heart, the young man quietly accepted his destiny.

As soon as he reached the city, he headed to the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie and messaged Professor Blumenttrit: “I wish to show those who deny us patriotism that we know how to die for our duty and our convictions.”

With great sadness his friend responded with just a single line: “Consumatum est.” It was finished.

A week later Joseph Mercado was on a clipper-steamer back to Manila, resolved to meet the immensity of his fate.

Thecel: Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.

AFTER RECEIVING A secret report from Joseph’s landlady, Frau von Kusiemski, the Count of Benomar sent his best spy to the Wolpertinger Luftbad sanitarium.

The erstwhile ‘Uranian poet from Hanover’ had hidden a small dictaphone in Professor Lebenskünstler’s study. Its wax cylinder produced the proof that the Reino de España had been seeking – that the foreign student, Joseph Alonso y Mercado, was Señor Laong Laan, the seditious author they had long been looking for.

That evening, the false poet sat next to Joseph, and spiked his drink with laudanum. In the middle of the night, the count’s top agent crept into his room, and silently broke the young man’s neck. Afterward, he burned the old cabin to ashes.

Joseph’s name became a footnote in history. His books were all destroyed, save for a single set of copies in the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Phares: Thy kingdom is divided and is given to the Medes and Persians.

KLARA STOLE INTO his room that night, and the two made noisy, passionate love. In Joseph’s fevered imagination, she was made of fire, and he was made of water. Water drowned fire, he reflected, and fire dried water. He knew that something in him had been irrevocably changed.

When they were done, she pointed to a trunk she had left by the washstand, before disappearing into the darkness. In the nearby lake, the body of a tall, bearded Hanoverian quietly drifted toward the silty gray bottom, a trail of crimson flowing from a single bullet wound to the head.

Joseph opened the trunk. Inside were a Mashinengewehr recoilless machinegun and the plans for a small, steam-powered Babbage Engine. On the handle of the weapon was an inscription carved in Latin: “Bene legere saecla vincere” – to read well is to master the ages.

Joseph blew out his lamp and stared into the blackness, unable to sleep. He abhorred violence, yet he could not deny that this kind of gun was power. It could be reverse-engineered, evening the odds for the ‘savage insurrectionists’ who were already fighting in his name. The Babbage engine could coordinate a military response, and spread his words to the world.

However Joseph worried that, even if his people succeeded in lifting the yoke of the white man, it would only be because white men themselves allowed it. What debt would he owe his mysterious benefactors? When would they collect?

The next day, he boarded the Locomotive Aerostatique to Berlin. As soon as he reached the city, he headed to the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, and sent a curt message to Professor Blumenttrit: “Thank you?”

He signed off with the new name he had given himself, ‘Matanglawin’. (Joseph Alonso y Mercado, Jose Rizal, and Crisostomo Ibarra, as he knew them, were all dead.)

A week later, Matanglawin was on a clipper-steamer back to Manila – resolved to fight his Kastila masters, but deeply troubled by what the future could bring.

 

 

Victor Fernando R. Ocampo is a Singapore-based writer. His writing has appeared in many publications, including Apex Magazine, Bahamut Journal, Likhaan, The Philippines Free Press, Strange Horizons, Science Fiction World, and The Quarterly Literature Review of Singapore, as well as anthologies like The Best New Singapore Short Stories, Fish Eats Lion: New Singaporean Speculative Fiction, Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, and the Philippine Speculative Fiction series. His story, ‘Here Be Dragons’, won first prize at the 2012 Romeo Forbes Children’s Literature competition. Visit his blog at vrocampo.com or follow him on Twitter @VictorOcampo.