In that way storytellers live forever.
I don’t think I ran—I rolled into the grove, and I squeezed myself through the banyan’s grave roots, bag flag and all, to dwell in the ghost-shape of the banyan’s host—
523 Nakakabuwisit talaga: bursts of Tagalog occur frequently; here, much of the text is a mix of colloquial Tagalog and obscene Castilian. (Trans. Note)
Entry #44
I lay there, looking at a crack through my damp burrow, at the hanging fingers of the banyan tree, its branches looping about the heavens like a maze of fantastic bat wings. Soon, I knew, I’d hear the bats, the geckos, and the owls. We used to play in groves like these, out by the creeks of Kawit.
Long ago.
Entomological fulmination in immobile rectitude.
Guess what the tree branches look like, tanga!
The banyan begins not as a tree but a mass of strangleholds, tentacle-roots choking its unsuspecting host, say a fruitwood—langka or guava. The roots start out innocently enough, fine epiphytes of pulp. It’s only later that it turns woody, a semblance of its origins. In a grove of banyans by the bat caves in Cavite that I used to climb, one could hide perfectly still among the branches and listen to the sky.
The best groves are those with the oldest trees, with their gnarled roots upon roots. It was fun to squeeze through its cannibal contortions until you traced the whole of the vanished form into which the banyan tree had become.
The banyan above me, the one that chanted, spoke as if it were the voice of many, perhaps bees or locusts, united in a single drone:
—Because encryption is a way of burying, the banyan said.
I lay in the depths of a phantom shape, against shards of damp wood. It was cramped but cozy, and trapped with me were my proliferating personal effects, now a bit bulky, all of us in a cocoon beyond the battle.
I lay in that gap in the banyan grove, and I heard her steps go by the dark path. It was over. By that time it was over. And as far as I could tell it was stalemate, and the flies and the beetles and soon the rats were perhaps the victors. The fields and streams of Balara were quiet, and even the remnant chickens were asleep, out by the unhusked grains of the Chinese bodega.
She felt me staring at her—Leonor has the intuition of a witch.
I got out with difficulty: the bag hoist on the petate—I mean, of course, the other way around: I swaddled the bag with my unraveling mat.
Without a word, I followed her down the paths of the banyan grove.
It did not surprise me that Leonor would appear at that point near the climax, which is an image in my mind that looks anyhow like a figure hanging perhaps at the edge of a cliff by its fingers, or maybe by a rope, whereas a denouement looks a bit like a flat planggana.
It was Leonor who put it together, in the post-amble of a lover’s walk.
Because nothing exists without an observer. Because the writer died while he was writing. Because encryption is a way of burying.
Still, I said, there was something missing.
Leonor turned to me and nodded.
God, I thought: we really smelled.
Entry #45
Cash.
Pesos, reales, pesetas, kusing.
Centimos, sencillos, small change, coins.
Sikapat, kahati, salapi, piso.
Years and months and weeks and days of contributions from the Sons of the People, twenty-five cents here, twelve cents there, when most of us could barely eke out a peso, and two pesos were a godsend, enough to betray the revolution.
Those scraps and scrapings squeezed from the lives of our men rained out of the bag in the dead of the banyan grove.
When I opened up what seemed innocently enough Dr. Pio’s leather medical bag, I thought—no, this was not the destiny I had hoped for.
This was not to be my footnote in the revolution.
There were ledgers, signatures, and pens. There were memos and calculations and IOUs. Vale: one lamp jar. Signed, Genaro (a.k.a. Pato). It was just my luck. Curse my fate. I had the cash of the Katipunan on my hands, the damned bag of the treasurer of the revolution. Why they had put it in the charge of Matandang Leon’s army, who knew; and why they gave it to a starving pair of Bulakeños who had barely the strength to sing Santo Santo Kasis and do the hokey pokey with their left and the right, much less smuggle out the goods in a heavyweight medical bag—I could curse the Secret Chamber, or the Most Respected, Most High Association of the Sons of—if we weren’t cursed enough already.
Now where to put it? Where to hide the sums so I could stuff the papers into the bag instead? I buried the money under the gnarled roots of the banyan. Somewhere in Balara, in a grove by a ditch and a Chinese bodega. One day, I hope the nation finds it.
Part Five
Aftermass524 525
524 Both the title and what follows occur completely in English in the original text, most of it neatly typed. (Trans. Note)
525 English? But why? Is it the American period already? Just as it was getting interesting. But now as the G.I.s bombard deserted and tranquil Manila Bay (the 1898 Battle of the Bay was a farce, cousin to the sinking of the irrelevant Maine, Admiral Dewey charging decrepit Manila warships barely armed by Spain!)—I feel my skin turn a bluish bile-swarmed hue. I know soon I will descend into
