175 Raymundo’s fascination for the trivia of the literary arts, e.g., letters and types, was pronounced. As the entries flow into his adolescence, anagrams, acrostics, coded texts, and other puzzle word games abound. (Trans. Note)
176 Ehem, Ms Translator: the letter K is not an autistic typographical obsession. It is romantic love for the revolution! In San Roque, Raymundo Mata has just met the short-legged but soulful sister of Agapito Conchu, code-named K in this journal. In this retrospective text, he conflates romance with his future, undying love: the nation—that is, K—the Katipunan! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
Entry #15
I sat in the banyan grove, listening, just in case. Light was falling, the world was going blind.177 178 179 My cue for movement was the faint rustle I began to hear—a feathery fidgeting one could detect only out of long silence. The bats were stirring from their cave,180 telling me I should begin my walk back home.181
But as I climbed off the banyan’s gnarled branch, that is, its ghost tree, there he appeared. Bernardo Carpio, Diego Silang, Padre Pelaez—all the heroes of the past rising from the ashes. Or, better and infinitely wonderful, Padre Mariano Gomez, hallowed be his name, who baptized me in stealth (so my uncle says). It was my father—but it was also all of the men182 of my uncle’s stories. Dark, benevolent, and hunchbacked. This man was dressed in rags with a basket of rambutan in his hand.183 He was skulking to the ground—he crouched, startled. He was dressed as a woman. He did not speak.184
Of course I knew him as my father because of his crinkling brow, protruding upper lip, giant katsila nose, and my own eyes: bright, broad-lashed, and stupefied. He was the funeral figure in the portrait in my grandfather’s home.
He looked like me.
Except he wore a dress.
He, on the other hand, had no idea who I was.
I took a step forward, he took a step back. I looked back at the emerging, slow flurry of the bats, rising from behind us like ominous ashes. My father followed my gaze and looked with attention at the dark creatures.
“Paniki,” I whispered.185 186
The name came out of the lowering forest like a sigh of trees, a part of the day’s progress. As darkness comes, sounds gain precise trajections, geometries in space that I can trace, like compass points. For me, nature has a comforting orderliness in the dark. Birdcalls have their logic, insect wings move in reasonable hum. Nature’s purposes are clear when sight is gone. I understand that this is not true of most, who are scared by night’s secrets—except for this man, my father, whose glance without fear tested the flight of bats with responding radar.187
They hovered above us now, as if bidden by their name.
He now looked at me with the same thoughtful glance he gave to the night fliers. They had an awkward way of flying, these blind pilots—not from lack of skill but from habit, their sense of space’s immensity that they rightly claim for themselves. Reeling wings, like drunken birds, pointless rocking, zigzagging then “righting” themselves up—their bumbling aviation mimicked the trembling leaves, the rustling wind in the woods, a cunning shadow-like presence. They opened their mouths as if to scare us—a feral yawn that doubled as sonar scream. Then they flew off, leaving us to our thin radars of recognition, our infinitely weaker human ways of connection.
“Paniki,”188 189 190 responded my father.191 “My poor Bulag.”192
“No. Not Paniki. My name is Raymundo,” I said, the retort in his presence I’ve always wished to speak.193
The message of his image: he was alive.
I went after him, but he was gone. I ran back home, bats tracing my joy in dark reels, flying upside down like drunks. But when I reached the windows of the kumbento, and I saw my uncle’s dark figure, like a paniki himself, outlined in hunched fatigue, as if reading, I stopped. Would he believe me? And anyhow, what did it matter? It was this grave, nerve-wracked man who had taken me to his burdened heart—it was he who loved me like my father.
Tio U., I saw him dressed like Apoy Yaka, an old lady, he carried a basket of rambutan.
And what is your evidence that woman was he, my son?
Because he ran away when he heard my name.
Ay, bulag ka talaga!194 195 196
177 In reality, Raymundo was going blind: my understanding from his indifferent relatives, still living a stone’s throw from the Republic’s Memorial to Independence, in Kawit, is that as a young boy he could see well in the day but had a degenerative nightblindness, a debility now labeled retinitis pigmentosa. I empathize with his sense of loss, the symptoms of a possibly genetic ailment over which he has no control. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
178 First overt textual reference to blindness, apart from Uncle’s Admonition (“Tio U. angry. My eyes . . . ,” see Entry #6). One hazards the view that blindness at this stage may have been hysterical, and I don’t blame him. I can only make empathic guesses. Certainly, there are many things this youth might wish to be “blind” to: unrequited love, an absent father, a socially castrated uncle, a dead mother, and a grandfather from Jaca. The cases in which a hysteric’s fetish progresses from organic truth are myriad. The human body is not just a vessel, it is an accomplice (cf. Epithets XLIV). (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
179 Isn’t “the world was going blind” personification for dusk? (Trans. Query)
180 This is foreshadowing. In late 1897, after rebel successes in Cavite, the revolutionaries retreated in despair from the fresh onslaught of Spanish colonel Miguel Primo de Rivera and his redoubled forces. They found refuge in paniki caves, dark and sulfurous regions distressingly familiar to one among Aguinaldo’s men—the stoic, blind soldier Raymundo Mata. This camp was the famous Biak-na-Bato, last refuge of Emilio
