193 This seems to be a Good Dream. As opposed to the Bad Dream, the Good Dream “names” (so to speak, but not really) traumas. The boy’s trauma seems to be that he is unknown to father, and vice versa. This kind of dream leaves you refreshed, wide awake, and unaccountably happy, as if your dilemma, by this “naming,” has been resolved. The Bad Dream, of course, is whatever makes you a mess. It’s true that on any day the Good Dream could become the Bad Dream, and vice versa. The problem with The Mürky Mürks, according to Mürk, in his “Letter to Ménårdsz” [Mürk’s Epistles No. 54], is that they believed language of any kind was a virtue, whereas, as we should know, it will always doublecross us. The reddish stain on my cheek, a welt of consciousness, traveled with me that entire summer, though on that day I, too, chased the Mürky Mürks out of the arboretum—faithful to my mentor, betrayer of my love. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Villefranche-sur-mer, France)
194 Chronologically, this entry seems to have occurred or been situated during vacation months (March through May) of 1885. A year later his uncle sent the chastened boy off to Manila, in anger over Raymundo’s alleged truant exploits in San Roque, wandering off to bat caves and forests when he should have been memorizing the litanies to Mary at the Latinidad. Thus ended the San Roque chapter in his life. (Trans. Note)
195 The issue is why? Why does this dream occur at this point in his life? He is undergoing puberty; he dreams of manhood; he exercises freedoms he has never indulged in before; he is sexually volatile, experimental, and confused. Various signs of repression fly about: a healthy, accepting homosexuality? chronic onanism? Or perhaps the bats (in this dream mere background) are in fact his real subject, the foreground of his reverie: i.e., putas, or mga babaing mababa ang lipad [low-flying women, for which bats are also metonyms]. The question remains: what was he doing in the banyan tree? The forest’s association with the father—a masked rebel, a skirted bandit, a wanderer in exile whispering secrets in his ear—comes off as ruse: Disguise. No alibi is an accident, so says the savant. Just as, on a national level, what erotic jouissance is encoded, nay, gleefully discharged, in the aggressive battle with the colonial master—masked here in the banal skirts of doomed romance, this melodrama between pére and fils? (Dr. Diwata Drake, New Orleans, Louisiana)
196 Oh. My. God. Dr. Diwata. My kidney’s going spastic, my knuckles are cracking. Kill me now with your speculative saecolorum, Dominus vobi-scum! You’re worse than the mumbo-jumbo of the friars! This is a heart-rending meeting with the boy’s long-lost father, a moment of affection, of familial reunion! Where’s your humanity, your sensitive side: you vampire, you black-hearted, malnourished—bat? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
Entry #16
“The Legend of Travestida”
Always the double, always the mirror197 198—I was in his clutches: the Man of No Return. He was my father, but he was also my mother; he was the womb and he was the grave.199 200 He wore a striped jacket with dutiful cravat, like that worn by Atenistas:201 a ready-made tie clipped to his collar, a vulgar insincerity. He looked man-made, not wrought by God. Even his trade was contrived: a fruit-seller in the wilds, where wild fruit held dominion. His jacket did not match his floral skirts, with their green-and-violet lace. Nobody was fooled. I spied him from a heart’s-width—the length of my sight; my uncle was right. I was blind. In that case, he fooled me. Maybe he was my father; maybe he was my mother. He spoke my name.
“Fruit Bat.”
But how do you know who I am?
You left me before I even learned to read, and now you mock my longing.202
Love is not what I want from you, but it is my right.
He did not stay. He left me with ten admonitions:203
“1. Beware of dogs. 2. In certain temperatures, watermelon is poisonous. 3. Love your neighbor as yourself; when you are moved to kill him, don’t. 4. Also, never pick a fight with printers, boat porters, and ladies. 5. Penetrate beyond illusion. 6. Never drink of the sap of the paraiso bark in the month of April. 7. Beware the seed of the paho fruit, fleshy and fulvous; the lanzones fruit, when burnt, acts as pesticide. 8. Whosoever takes up arms for love of country is as a babe suckling at his mother’s breast and moves in harmony with nature. Also, if you don’t look back at your past, you’re a pest. 9. August, the month of Caesar, is a good time to go to war. 10. Now I know why women wear skirts.”
He left, taking everything with him, even the rambutan in the basket. Over the course of years, these are the bandit el genio Jote’s reported acts of bravery, which I enumerate briefly to save lamp oil:204 disarming a Guardia Civil in Noveleta while said enemy was eating a baduya (flavored banana) in 1896; stealing a horse in the dead of night and serving it to troops in Naik by morning, leaving only a note (but this may be apocryphal); offering lunch to the wounded Supremo (going by in a hammock) near Limbon;205 206 helping a woman out of a ditch in Balara; acting as courier in multiple instances in the trench lines between San Mateo, near Manila, and the revolutionary forces in Cavite; picking juicy pakwan to offer troops exhausted by battle in Imus. In all these comings and goings, el genio Jote remained incognito yet appreciated, rumored and ineffable, and impossible to interview, such being his vaunted modesty, but most of all his slipperiness,207 208 his astonishing mystery. He also raised a ruck209 210—
197 Siempre doblando, siempre espejándose. An interesting switch to puerile Spanish, which seesaws through these early sections,
