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
