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
