181 In Raymundo’s memory, the rebels’ retreat to Biak-na-Bato was suffused with an atmospheric trail of bats—symbol of the darkness into which the rebels would descend after the (temporary) surrender of Aguinaldo’s troops to Spain, and the still darker, grim fate that awaited them in the next phase of revolution, against America. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
182 Raymundo nostalgically names a number of heroes for whom I have fond though spotty recall. Bernardo Carpio, the only man in the list who never lived, is a superhero in a significant, therefore unread, tale, a giant chained to a cave; the trembling in the cavern as he pushes at his chains explains why the country has volcanoes. Bonifacio liked him; Rizal alludes to him in his novels; geologists are not that into him. Diego Silang was an Ilocano rebel who terrorized the Spaniards, though his wife, Gabriela, of course, was the actual fighter. Padre Pelaez: saintly Archbishop of Manila who died among the ruins of the Cathedral during the 1863 earthquake (see also Entry #5). Padre Gomez [see also Entry #1]: family friend of the Matas. In the end, disturbingly clerical images indicate the boy was still his uncle’s nephew—conservative, Catholic, and devout. I can’t wait for him to turn rebel. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
183 Perhaps a dream. Consequent to the Masturbation Entry (#13), this scene might be viewed as displaced guilt from his joyful habit of jacking off. Or not. What comfort is there when heroes reveal their humanity in gross ways? A lot. The transvestite detail has intriguing psychoanalytic possibilities. As for erotic matters such as rambutan (hairy, vaguely pubic, a squamous aside) and bat-cave fetish (need I mention cavernous holes, and the freaky furry creatures disgorging from them?), I shall leave their psychic design to the reader’s imagination. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
184 Dr. Diwata Drake, I have one word for you. Quack! If I weren’t tied to i.v. tubes, with abasic despondency and a still undiagnosed lung problem, not to mention weird epidermal eruptions right now, like fish scales, on my arms, I’d be rushing to Kalamazoo to give you a piece of— (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
185 “—Paniki, sabi ko . . . etc.” Fruit bat is an approximate translation of one of the species known in the Philippines generically as paniki. Whether Raymundo uses the term as vocative, addressing his father as demonic apparition, or nominative, naming the actual bats, is ambiguous. In any case, flying vermin appearing with long-lost fathers is not a good sign. (Trans. Note)
186 Most probably the golden crown flying fox, Pteropus vampyrus, found only in the Philippines and once swarming over central and southern Luzon, in the days before concrete condominiums ruined its habitat and the view from the (also diminished) esteros. If I might add, “blind as a bat” is not scientific; bats can see, but it’s more convenient for them to navigate by sound because they’re weird. I had to learn all that in high school biology, when really, all I wanted was to play bulangkoy. Ah well, those were the days, how our youthful prisons become charmed memories. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
187 The use of the modern acronym radar [from radio detection and ranging] is an inspired translation from the antiquated Tagalog. (Trans. Note)
188 The text implies that this term paniki was a boyhood nickname of the hero. The state of the manuscript indicates many pages have been lost, and the scenes that began this name-calling are not told. (Trans. Note)
189 Aha! A telling reference to the hero’s nom de guerre. Raymundo was attached to fruit bats perhaps because of the “blind” creature’s metaphoric (or is it metonymic, this part of my education always confuses me, in the same way I’ve always mixed up Nashville with Memphis) relationship to the author’s degenerative eye disease. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
190 Names are the most arbitrary among the plots that frame us; simply responding to our “names” is an act of repression. What’s hidden and slips in response to the question, “who are you,” is intolerable: I have no idea, someone else gave it to me. The typical Filipino name—the ones that conjoin the Spanish with the American (e.g., Cherry-Pie Morena, Dimples de la Cruz)—inscribes old struggles in daily speech. But at least they’re funny. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C.)
191 This section, The Dream of the Bat and the Father, is the boy’s third hallucination. Another psychotic break, wrapped in historic tissue. It’s no surprise the boy was prone to visions, given his orphan troubles. That these spells of lunacy have a coherent literary quality is, to my mind, more disturbing. Perhaps it underlines for us the paralyzing fact that, above all, neurosis is word-bound, and it spooks me to think one day one will submit to the mind’s intolerable whim—when in dementia language becomes “a shuddering excretion of pustulant dreams” (cf. The Mürky Manifesto, tract written by renegade students of Mürk, led by the Colombian-Latvian translator/critic Pedro Ménårdsz and known collectively as The Mürky Mürks, expelled from Mürk’s Analytic Arboretum in Antibes in 1968 for a bizarre episode of mud throwing and an “ecstatic abandonment of science,” one of them even pinching me as he exited. The Ménårdszian minion left a ruby streak on my cheek, shaped like a soggy rhombus, which sometimes stings even now, a phantom palm). (Dr. Diwata Drake, Foggy Bottom, Washington, D.C.)
192 As previously
