I bore a corsage of misery, like a lash on my chest, but this affray, for some reason, lifted my spirits. I had no idea what it was about. Idoy and Crispulo had the last word and tore up the pamphlet in Agapito’s face.
That was the end of that.
I was walking home one afternoon along Magallanes when of all people I met my old Latin teacher, Father Gaspar. We had coffee.
—And you are progressing in your studies?
—Yes, Father.
—And your uncle, the priest, he is doing well?
—Yes, Father.
—And does he know you are going with that crowd?
—Which crowd? No, Father!
—Ah. You think we don’t hear about those things? The fight in Binondo at the Japanese Tagawa’s place.
—Oh, no, Father. Someone took me there. It was not—
—It’s a cult. The love of country. It’s a blasphemy unto God.
—Yes, Father.
—Love God above all. Avoid tangential divagations.
—Yes, Father.
—And what will you do next?
—I hope to study medicine. Or law. Or teach. Or maybe, I said shyly—maybe I’ll write books.
—Hmph. Stick to one, boy. You’re a daydreamer and a scatterbrain, but there’s hope for you. Look at this one.
—Who is this, Father?
He pointed his bony fingers at the grimy book on the table.
I hadn’t noticed the bundle he was carrying.
—Look at this one. An Ateneo boy! He studied to be a doctor but now—he’s a pamphleteer. A novelist! What will the world come to next? Lawyers will start pharmacies!
—Yes, Father.
—I read this from cover to cover. It makes me sick.
—Then maybe you should put it away, Father?
—No. I will give it to you. Keep it. Then throw it away to someone else.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was late for dinner, and I took his gift, running back to the boarding house before the kerosene lamps came on. Even as I sat there in the café, I was suspicious of Father Gaspar—no one throws away a book, even bad ones, in this blighted city.
Either you sell it or burn it.
And he must have taken the brawl in Binondo for something else. He was going a bit senile, Father Gaspar. In my last years at the college, I had begun to feel kinship with him, which was not a good thing. Students made fun of him, especially the Spanish boys, copying his scared, shuffling gait and the way he always bowed in unction before foreigners, even the young ones, and his manner with me mixed obsequiousness with affection, which annoyed and distressed me at the same time. But I think it’s precisely his pitiful authority that made me consider his image without scorn and to believe even pity was dishonor.
To pity him was like sorrowing over my own fate.
I didn’t touch his ratty book, oily and disheveled from use.331 332 For a nauseating novel, it had gone through a lot of thumbing! I was in a state of malaise, of contradictory ardor that made me lie in bed and do nothing. My days of passionate error were over, and I kept fondling her lone paper rose, now crumpled and dirty from much abuse, with self-loathing. Oh, I was a clown and a degenerate, a jackass shaking on my bed. I couldn’t stop myself, I committed all the sins of inertia, and then some. Sometimes, I wept.
When Benigno visited, as he always did, sniffing at the room’s disorder, concern palpable in his gentle eyes, I told him my suspicions about Father Gaspar, how I thought he was trying to frame me. Don’t be silly, Benigno said. I swear he was waiting for me on the street, staking out the boarding house! Frame you for what? With a book, I said. A gift. It must be for your graduation, Benigno said. Everyone knows you were his favorite, though no one knows why, you idle lump!
Yes, it was true, I was graduating, and perhaps that led me to even more dolorous dumps than I imagined it would. What to do now with my learning, my fine declensions and knowledge of the nasty novels about hunchbacked old Frenchmen? What to do with the riddles of La Rochefoucauld and the shrewdness of that dead Jesuit, the illuminating, humane and, to be honest, kind of wicked Fray Balthasar Gracían, artist of worldly wisdom?
If only I could ship off to Madrid like the rest of those lucky bastards, Filipinos with money to burn, become an ilustrado and shove it to the colonies! Imagine myself in Barcelona, in a frock coat with two beauties beside me, one an irresistible, but surly, gypsy, the other a moral floozy with a heart of some kind of insipid alloyed metal, and both polishing my mustache with their underskirts!
Oh God, that I was a cross-dressing bandit’s abandoned son and blind as a bat!
What I would do with a fine pedigree and good health, or even just some lands off Laguna de Bay plus twenty-twenty vision, not to mention brogues of Scottish heather, as they picture stout Alpine stompers in La Ilustración. Even Germany would be a haven, with its dank goats and strangely attired shepherds, and fat women with the red cheeks! And what about Brussels, with chocolates like lace and spittoons as large as fountains. Or London with its drafty libraries and Vienna of the second-rate beer, according to the damned wits of El Mundo Ilustrado? I would even take the sooty boats that transport one to America, paddling ridiculously along on their gigantic, musical wheels to the futuristic sideshows of their dull, mechanical shores.
And what of the sweet belles of Hong Kong, the tawdry charmers of Marseilles, and lisping socialites of far-off Seville? Worlds too vast for my outraged longing sat on my mind’s porch, like ravens. No wonder I lay in a stupor, burdened by their black, hungry, and beady eyes.333 334
And around Manila there were these forces of distemper, of ghoulish suspicion that darkened the streets, and no one would tell me exactly what was going on. My classmates at
