Part Two
Provinciano in the City
In which the hero arrives in Manila, denounced for truancy and “imbibing”—Becomes a sexual deviant—Learns ‘real’ Spanish at the Ateneo Municipal—Hates his boardinghouse—Describes Lady K, of the short legs and ample modesty—Nurses a broken heart—Feels like hell—Is scared shitless by Father Gaspar—Is cursed by a book—Observes Agapito’s secret passion—Shares doughnuts and chocolate with a cripple, among others—Prefers sex to sedition—God punishes him for not becoming a Mason
Entry #17
So this is what it’s like. Boats, cobblestones, esteros.218 Eating walnuts from paper cones while leaning against the wall.219 Horseshit on streets, bats in trees. Chinese men, hair like kite-tails, selling paper by the handful. While the women smell of fish and look like angels. (There are also innocent girls I better not touch.) Rats. Spitting, spitting everywhere, a carnival, a contest of spitting. Good one. Got it smack on the curtain of the carretela.220 221 It smells here. It really does. Rotting fruit, guano, shrimp-fry, mud, and the awful offal222 223 224 225 that clutters the streets—trash, trash, trash, even in front of Don P.R.’s mansion: it’s a city of garbage. Not to mention the Germans and Dutch by the waterfront, their perfume made me cough. I packed so quickly I’m not wearing the right shoes: I’m wearing Chinese flipflops226 and carrying a carton suitcase, like a peddler. So this is Manila. Damn that letter writer. I could die of dysentery from everyone’s phenomenal phlegm.227
218 That is, swampish rivulets flowing from the Pasig River. A term still used today to denote waterlogged and still swamp-smelling ancient portions of the city. (Trans. Note)
219 Cucuruchos de almendras habang nakasandal ha pader: In these sections on his arrival in Manila, the young diarist from the provinces favored Espangalog, street-talk variant of Spanish and Tagalog (with some Visayan). (Trans. Note)
220 Tumpak ha tela de carretela: his prepositions verged on the Visayan, though nouns—especially for manufactured goods, as in tela (cloth, or curtain: telon) and carretela (horse-cart)—were Castilian. Adverbs (e.g., tumpak) mainly Tagalog. (Trans. Note)
221 The linguistic hash has its logic. That nouns, easily imported elements, should be Castilian makes sense: in the American-centric century, for instance, Filipinos logically called a refrigerator just Frigidaire; to take a picture is to Kodak—the commercial noun is its being, commerce constructing the being of the colonized—no need for translation. Prepositions have always been bane the of language-learners. Here, the Visayan preposition ha signals the dominion, unheralded but ubiquitous, of regional, migrants’ languages in the nation’s soul. As for the rampant Tagalog adverbs, bubbling up like undigested walnuts-in-a-cone, they are the crunchy dregs of Raymundo’s mishmashed linguistic tract. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Zurich, Switzerland)
222 Bastos na basura: Raymundo’s endless wordplay is obsessive. (Trans. Note)
223 I would hesitate to say that some pathology of the tongue possesses Raymundo Mata. But obsession might be normal, especially among Filipinos. These psychodynamics of the everyday can wrap anyone in phonemic warps: alliteration, anagrams, et al.—play abounds in anyone’s daily speech. Best to view linguistic play as humorous weapon, not disorder. In such subjects as Raymundo Mata, the slipshod work of the colonial unconscious joins with the exuberance of language acquisition to make of the linguistic mess of one’s daily life, well, a form of art. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Schaffhausen, Switzerland)
224 Ha! Speaking of puns, Dr. Diwata, I have three words for you: Psychobabaw! (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
225 Ah, indeed! Touché. I urge you to read my opus, Professor Estrella—the grand offshoot of my work with the great Mürk in the aftermath of that sad fracas, the Antibes Plenary of 1968. I sided with him, my mentor, and betrayed my love, true. But it was all worth it! Read my book Your Lovely Symptoms—The Structure of the [Un]Conscious, Not Really Lang[ue] or Even a Parol[e], and it may explain your fine phrase. These are the symptoms of your peculiar desire, couched in your pun: Foreignism, Judaeo-Christianism, and Tagalism. To wit, psychobabaw [etymology]: Psycho, foreign [in this case Americanist] slang, short for psychopath!, pronounced: sigh-koh! Babel, or babble [hence, psychobabble], obvious Biblical allusion. Babaw: Tagalism, a local epithet, pejorative adjective, meaning shallow! What’s enfolded in your triple-decker pun? Your lovely symptoms, fractured, fragmented, [w]hole! (Dr. Diwata Drake, Schaffhausen, Switzerland)
226 Chinitong-chinelas: another nonsensical neologism; racist. (Trans. Note)
227 Nakakapatangang nganga: gross. (Trans. Note)
Entry #18
“Dagobert the Coward,
Or, Memoirs of a Student in Manila, 1886”228 229
“To hell with secret lists, jousts in the dark on my white horse—rescuing not maidens but my hot-coal hands, my feverish limbs.” So resolved Dagobert the Coward on his way to speak her name. The great nineteenth-century swordsman, Conde de Monte-Buntis, held by the hand the sweet prepubescent Lady K, damsel of fan, cowl, and comb,230 231 of paper flowers and leaden pen, of short legs descending from endless stairs, Manila mantilla in disorder, but no one dared notice (she was only fourteen). Dagobert looked downcast at her feet, step by step descending: embezzling desire. The Count held her in perpetuity, in impunity, in insolence.232 233 234 Ecce homo: he, Dagobert, would put an end to that.
But first: what were his weapons? Item: a subjunctive and morbid heart. Item: lots of adjectives. Item: allusions to Virgil and other classical sources. Items: loquacious, nose, dwarfishness.235 Item: a bag (more like a paper cone, a cardboard cornet) of walnuts.
Second: what were his obstructions? His own heart, his speech, his knowledge, his smallness, his history of powerful vacillation.
Thus Dagobert went to war, with a cardboard cone of words236—stupefied, tedious, fugitive, brooding, and anxious. His loyal horse, Atontado, gleamed brightly on the grass, a ruminant pillow. His young squire, Enojoso, a bit thick-skulled, had the monotonous habit of flicking his right shoulder like an epileptic, but Dagobert couldn’t afford any better. Knights with good posture were hard to find in modern times. Fugaces, his plural patrons, a pair of evil twins, had faces like Romans but no idea how to ride a horse; thus they paid Dagobert to undertake adventures while they sat safely at home, picking their teeth
