241 Agapito and Benigno, Raymundo’s pals from San Roque, soon to transfer like Raymundo to Manila. (Trans. Note)
242 Una ciudad que nunca duerme, que sueña como un duende [awkwardly literal: city that never sleeps, dreams like a goblin]. (Trans. Note)
Entry #19
Number 15, Calle Caraballo, 1886243
If I were to retrace my steps down those cobbled lanes, sidestepping memory’s potholes, leaping over nostalgia’s waterlogged carriage ruts, I would find myself before a latticed window of capiz-shell ruin,244 245 not too different from others around it—a mix of elegance and atrophy, the kind of squalor that ennobles many recollections of students returning from Madrid to Manila. I was no foreign traveler, a mere provincial in the city, but I borrow from their passages my current nauseous sense of disorientation (or it could be the effect of this moldy pan de sal, damn the Guardia Civil, I mean, American G.I.s). Houses with thatched roofs and wooden buildings with metal railings stood together on that street. The beauty of buntis trellises, those steel commas of geometric window art punctuating this modern city’s spectral homes, framed kerosene images of studious labor and hid the wildlife within.
Señora Chula took good care of us. A hospitable widow from our province, always carrying a book of novenas and whispering to her gods, she had proud pectorals and a benevolent rump. Agapito showed me the hole in the wall, where we had a good view of the novelties of the widow of Noveleta. I believed stooping to look through it was dastardly and inconvenient, and checked it out only twice a day.246 247 248
I preferred La Jovencita Varonil (name withheld). She had a sweaty mustache and limber pelvis and liked to play tuktukan with the guys. It was her innocence I liked, the way she did not care if I bumped against her torso or crammed my palms against her haunches, the better to declare her victories. I would crack eggs with her forever, though she laughed at me, rightly so, because I was clumsy, pumping against her boyish hipbones, and I always preferred to lose, distracted by her shaking body. She climbed trees like a tarsier, swam like a dog, and ate like Agapito: who chewed with his gums showing. She was not sultry as much as cadaverous. Everything about her was disreputable (including her precocious hairy armpits), and so, doubly enchanting.
Oh Manila! That first boarding house on Calle Caraballo swarmed with swampish fevers and disgraceful tumors—all mine. The suddenness of my situation fed my rash passions, so I excuse myself—abruptly disgorged as I was, barely sixteen, from the provincial games of the all-boy’s schoolhouse in San Roque. Where before I thought mostly of the cockpit, now I thought only of the henhouse. So many women, in narrow proximity—at night, only a plywood-inch away! La Jovencita was only one among other, less alluring nieces of Señora Chula. The pious Anday was her grumpy maid. Flat-chested (but what of that? her modest aureoles like meteor dust on earth’s thin camisa provided mutable compass points, disarranging and disturbing, as she cleaned and grumbled all day long). Murmuring the rosary in the vulgate (the more vulgar the better). Huge bun on the head, thicker than guano buns on trees. Titay, the cross-eyed four-year-old, Anday’s bastard child. One day her prince will come. Above all—oh.
Agapito’s sister.
Lady K—who sometimes visited.
Silence is best among the unworthy.
My fellow inmates were indifferent scholars and creative bullies. If only Tio U., mild-mannered lover of Cervantes, knew he’d thrown me into this bestiary, worse than the blanket-tossers in Don Quixote! He would weep, he would rush me back home, in person.
Señora Chula’s son, “Leandro,”249 250 251 252 253 was a rake and reprobate in the mold of Roman centurions, but more stupid—he organized a riverbank picnic the week I arrived, and while I was trying to keep my footing in the clammy mud he pushed me in—in jest. He tried to drown me in the Pasig then had the gall to save me! From the magnificent bosomy widow Señora Chula he earned a mother’s embrace, and as for me, the nearly drowned weakling, she sent a look of pity mixed with scorn. The beasts around me laughed. “Leandro” was tall, broad-armed, muscular—the type women pretended not to stare at then whispered about when he was gone. (Some nasty neighbors lay the obscure paternity of tiny, humpbacked Titay at his feet, the brute.) In his presence women, even his cousins, had a simpering fatuity that was never lost on him: he treated them with a nasty joviality—a particularly masculine candor—and they playfully tapped their fans against his boorish chest, giggling at his insolence. He was four years older than I and two heads taller.
I hated him.
“Florencio” from Batangas was “Leandro’s” sidekick, capable, kind, but easily misled. He had a knack for memorizing but a measly conscience, as small as a rat’s. In private, when we were alone (we shared a room with weeping “Moises”), he treated my miseries with sympathy and asked me advice about Latin; but in company with “Leandro” he slouched like an oaf and beat me up. “Moises,” a new boy like me, was always away on the weekends, picked up by his knock-kneed, sentimental Chinese mother who could not bear to have her only son gone from home. He treated his weepy Mama with contempt, laughing at her bent-over, shuffling walk with his companions; he didn’t tell anyone that whenever she left, he cried. He was a storehouse of vulgarity and, stout from his mother’s endless noodles,254 255 256 was good with his elbows, cudgeling the small boys under “Leandro’s” watchful eye. “Moises” did not last long, and “Arcadio” took his place, another cretin, a future criminal with bad teeth.
Soon it happened that when they learned of my debility (my Botica Luciano eyeglasses were a giveaway) they’d lure me out at night, and I, the fool, was tricked. On the pretext of “gathering santol” or “catching fireflies” they would strand me
