In time vulgar and deceitful gossip spread that our yet imaginary and embryonic love was, in fact, real; in all quarters our relations were spoken of and decided as fact when between the lovers we had declared nothing clearly except through glances and, on my end, the morose representation of a felt puppet, slouchy and a bit lumpy, made in her image but in truth looking sadly like a rodent. It was the best I could do. I saw her every Thursday and Sunday, and she, on receiving me, was always enchanting and attractive, capturing my heart that still denied complete surrender.
One day when an aunt and some others decided to make flowers for I do not remember which saint, waiting for me to pick them up later, I did not arrive at her college. I was ill. The next day I saw all the ladies wearing their church mantillas and waving their paper fans, there by the landing on the staircase. She was simply yet gracefully dressed, with hair loose and a smile on her lips.
—You have been unwell? she asked in a sweet voice.
—Yes, I answered, but now I feel better, thank you for your concer—
—Oh, last night I prayed for you, fearful that something bad had happened!—
—Thanks, I replied. If that is the case then I would prefer to be sick forever, if by doing so I had the happiness of being remembered by you: even death might be a blessing.
—What? she asked, you wish to die? That makes me sad.
Ay! How sweet was our conversation!
Ah! Happy times: how they wrench my heart!
Oh! Erase from memory that which should give joy but instead revives misery and desperation!
That Christmas, back home on vacation, the banks of the streams seemed melancholy, pondering many things and concentrating on none. I saw rapid waves carry branches torn off from trees, and my thoughts, wandering other regions and fastening on distant objects, took notice of nothing. Then I perceived a rumble, I raised my head and saw, wrapped in a cloud of dust, a number of carriages and horses. With violence my heart beat, and I turned pale. I stood by my horse on the narrow dirt road. There I waited.
There she was in a carriage passing by with her fiancé and other women from La Concordia. She waved at me, smiling and fixing her shawl; that’s all I saw and nothing more. And the car passed in rapid shadow, leaving nothing but a horrible vacuum in the world of my affections.286
276 The year is 1886. This section is a collage of events, surprisingly coherent, in flowing Spanish. (Trans. Note)
277 The opening lines here, so eerily similar to episodes in Rizal’s Memorias de un Estudiante de Manila, have a disturbing effect. If it weren’t for the tone of burlesque romance, non-existent in the self-portrait by the grave young Rizal, I would have sworn this buffoonish entry were a direct copy. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Chawton, England)
278 I prefer this side of him. I disagree with Dr. Diwata: he’s no buffoon; he’s urbane. This drawing-room Raymundo is muy simpatico, and I’m happy to note that he’s quite repressed. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
279 Casa Tomasina, on Calle Magallanes, Raymundo’s second boarding house, was a shell of its former self by the time Raymundo left in 1892: one by one young men left its wooden porticos to pursue the glittering scar that was Europe. Raymundo, though of Spanish descent on his wretched paternal grandfather’s side and so seen as “privileged,” was always in financial distress and limited by his uncle’s conservatism: all he saw of Europe he got from El Mundo Ilustrado, a monthly magazine. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
280 The text says hermana, a first reference to a sister. Did he have a sister? (Trans. Query)
281 Raymundo had no sister. Maybe it meant “beard,” someone in cahoots with his infatuation. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
282 The text reads mudo saludo, with a deleatur penciled in over the d in mudo, changed to l, that is, mulo saludo. My solution incorporates both terms. The inferior alternative was “mulish salute.” (Trans. Note)
283 The phrase does not occur in the original, which goes: “no le dirigí mas que un ceremonioso y mudo [mulo] saludo al que ella contestó con una gracia y delicadeza admirables.” However, her “admirable” delicacy implies his recognition of his rudeness, and my translation supplies the psychological truth he could not speak. Plus, he may not have known the Spanish word for “knuckle-head.” Torpe comes to mind. (Trans. Note)
284 A long way from the Ateneo, requiring a meandering banca drive (one must imagine travelers then going by river, not road, which transforms one’s concept of Manila), La Concordia College in Santa Ana was a convent school for women, favored by Manila’s merchants and the provincial bourgeois. Figures in Rizal’s novels, such as Maria Clara and Cecilia/Marcela, the heroine of Makamisa, went to such convents, and flighty colegialas today are their dismal descendants. Rizal himself frequented these girls’ colleges as a gentleman caller when he was a student in Manila. I concede to Dr. Diwata that Raymundo’s details, in fact, have an almost hallucinatory resemblance to Rizal’s memories of his youth. However, this is proof that college narratives, whether in 1876, 1886, or 1986, have decidedly limited thematic variations: e.g., the barkada-gang-of-friends theme, the waiting-in-the-vestibule theme, the nosy-aunt theme, the gift-giving theme, the wilting-souvenir theme, the lovelorn-look theme, and, of course, the heartbreak theme. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
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