261 Raymundo, now situated in markedly bourgeois, collegiate society, hive of the colonial metropole, pictures the “pure” woman, virginal, genuflecting: a lady with no trace of a vagina. Quite a contrast with the largesse of good, provincial Señora Chula. This is the image, a feeble idolatry damaging to all women, that urbane nineteenth-century writers perfected into inanition in characters such as Rizal’s vacuous Maria Clara. In Raymundo, we have revolution in another guise. His peculiarly hybrid tongue—provincial and metropolitan, regional and Tagalog—liberates him as he attempts to violate catatonic modesty inherited from Christian virtue. Good for him. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Clyde, Ohio)
262 Yes, Dr. Diwata, but should his revolutionary eye do so at the expense of her heaving chest? Oh, it’s not that I object to radical desire, but pity the suffering of translators—their damned conspiracy with masculine ways! This is the trouble with translation—I keep getting entangled in crimes of the patriarchy, especially in these sections of romantic dalliance in the nineteenth century that populate his adolescent journals. So on top of that, the risqué hero challenges the orthodoxy with vulgarity, so that not only his grammar but also his acts are flecked with misogyny, leavened by (rape-like) passion. (Trans. Note)
263 Not to mention, Mimi C., his demonic incursions here on the good manners and right conduct of Urbana and Feliza, the Emilies Post of nineteenth-century Manila. The epistolary form and especially the obsolete Tagalog used in the beginning allude to texts on manners such as Pagsusulatan ng Dalawang Binibini na si Urbana at Feliza (Letters between Two Women, Urbana and Feliza, 1864), etc. But Raymundo is no gentleman! Bastos! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
264 Dear Estrella, your own allusion, i.e., to the Victorian etiquette guru Emily Post, presents a lovely dilemma in these footnotes. For after all, Urbana and Feliza antedate the annoying Posts. Some would say your charming recidivism, the use of Western allusion to punctuate your patriotism, marks your subjective richness: the world is your oyster, and you devour it with a plate of salt. In our indiscriminate age, you and I have traversed the colonial and back. We eat the world raw at our own risk, colonial subjects one moment, voracious master of many cultures the next. This is our wealth, our privilege. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Baltimore, Maryland)
265 Emily Post-It that, bruja. Speak for yourself. I eat oysters with kalamansi—not salt! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
266 Various letters of the alphabet are scattered in this entry with the randomness of letterpress types crowding a printer’s drawer. These were leaden metals in which the alphabet retained an obdurate physicality: what was it like when you could hold the phantom phoneme, like a heavy key, in your hand? (Trans. Note)
267 Pagsusulatan ng Dalawang Binibini na si Urbana at Feliza was an etiquette and morality manual. This is anything but. Raymundo writes a rapturous (rapist!) love note, addressing anonymous virgins to make much of time. I repeat: Bastos! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
Entry #21
Number 17, Calle Magallanes, from October 1886
I was a poor student. My years in the cockpit at San Roque did not prepare me for this new world of the city. I was only good at spelling. Because I have a weird mind, the priests said, like a letterpress. My Latin was so-so, but my Spanish was terrible despite all those nights spent reading. Turns out, I read books without thinking, only for the feeling, the way words strike my soul; I should have examined their tenses, their syntax, the exceptions to the rules! Who cares if it’s true that Don Quixote de la Mancha suffered like Christ—if I wrote the esdrújula without an accent, I should be punished. I counted with pleasure the slaps on the forearm, the stings in the palm, all my transgressions whipped out of me. Yes, yes, take them away, my errors, my base conjugations! Let my welts swell up—the pus of lapsus—the easier for me to caress my wounds, stigmata of learning. Somehow it heightened the thrill of knowing—that I learned the masculine nature of all Greek words through lashings and earned the subjunctive case with my own blood.
I practiced my lessons everywhere. Riding the carriages, walking home, I looked for exercises of my prowess, grammar gymnastics. I translated songs, even conversations, in my head. I copied out whole sections of books in Spanish. Even the most boring, the numbing novenas, the etiquette manuals. I enjoyed the act of copying, rounding out words in my own hand, finding out verbs in the act, sprung from the cages of their conjugations. I translated Tagalog into Spanish, and once, just for fun, Spanish into Tagalog (an ad, I think, for a Minerva press, and I added a drawing, too, a piece of pleasant pulchritude I embellished extravagantly in art class). Soon enough I progressed. And I remember that day when Father Baltazar, an oratorical mollusk with languid limbs, instead of throwing the book at me, grunted, with a kind of animal surprise, when I declaimed—backwards!—the imperfect subjunctive of the verb matar in perfect simulation of his own screech. Tu mataras . . . él matara . . . ¡espero que yo te haya matado!268 269 I gained thirty-two lashes instead of the usual octuple for my flawless display. Who knows what would have happened if not for the insuperable pedantry of Father Baltazar?
I understood then the sinful triumph of suffering for pride, not ignorance.
I slept well that night (as long as I did not touch my forearms, which throbbed from knowledge). Even now my skin flushes, my beard trembles, when I remember my victory, the look of admiration, albeit violent, in the invertebrate priest’s eyes.
That look occurred spasmodically among my professors, I recall.
The next year, when I was no longer in his class, scholarly Father Baltazar would greet me in the hallway with that gaze of an epicanthic worm, a look that on his part passed
