Radicals in linen suits haunted the sermons of the priests.
Beware, beware!
Beware Masons, the friars yelled, their apoplectic spit burnishing sorry sodalists in the front pews. Masons are devils in our midst bloated with books under their coats, out to destroy our pleasure in the saints, including the fiestas, dancing, and theaters that prop up the love of God!
But who were they and who cared?
K. was gone.
She was sailing to Barcelona with her blasted love.
The last time I saw her, a desperate reunion—well, not really a reunion, I saw her by accident in the marketplace near Puente de España, and she looked into my eyes and went straight to a stand of imported pears, but I followed and pretended I could afford strange foreign fruit.
She said hello, as if surprised to see me, then the next thing I knew I was sobbing into her mantilla, and it was all I could do to get my schoolboy bowtie disentangled from her peineta as she said to me, there, there.
It was humiliating.
She treated me like her little brother’s friend, a nephew, a bloody bleating ungulate!
Then and there I realized—in her eyes I was a mere kid, a stupid goat. A bit neurotic, perhaps antic, but an immature lollipop nevertheless. Oh, my heart seethed with the sudden rancor of this revelation, and I fled the place, the apples, the fleshy pears and flashing pomegranates, racing across the bridge faster than all the carretela horses.335 336 337 I would prove to her, I thought, as I stumbled home along the cobbles. I’m graduating, then I’ll—I’ll—I’ll do what? I didn’t even have a ticket to get me back to Kawit, my uncle’s palay harvest had not come through, and I was stranded in Manila.
But one day, I vowed blindly, sidestepping housemaids above me emptying chamberpots, and gardeners watering orchids with the sulfurous surplus of the night’s ablutions—one day she will see. She did not know who I was. I would paint gladiators on gigantic canvases, I would create songs that would melt every single comb on her powdered head. I will write a book in which my countrymen would see themselves as if in a mirror, or at least like the reflection of a drunk in a wasted glass.
Then, as I said, I proceeded to sink into the squalor of my depravity, this morass of delinquent sloth that Benigno found me in. (Not to mention the laundresses, who bear my appalling linen away with glances that resemble hatred.) I remember that it was with this dread stink of self-pity—that gall that knows no fury like a life unlived—no matter if it was nobody’s fault, except my own—that I opened Father Gaspar’s book.
It was a bolt—a thunder bolt. A rain of bricks, a lightning zap. A pummeling of mountains, a heaving, violent storm at sea—a whiplash. A typhoon, an earthquake. The end of a world. And I was in ruins. It struck me dumb. It changed my life and the world was new when I was done. And when I raised myself from bed, two days later, I thought: it’s only a novel. If I ever met him, what would my life be? I lay back in bed. But what a novel! And I cursed him, the writer—what was his name—for doing what I hadn’t done, for putting my world into words before I even had the sense to know what that world was. That was his triumph—he’d laid out a trail, and all we had to do was follow in his wake. Even then, I already felt that bitter envy, the acid retch of the latecomer artist, the one who will always be under the influence, by mere chronology always slightly suspect, a borrower never lender be. After him, all Filipinos are tardy ingrates. What is the definition of art? Art is a reproach upon those who receive it. That was his curse upon all of us. I was weak, as if drugged. I realized: I hadn’t eaten in two days. Then I got out of bed and boiled barako for me.338 339 340 341 342
Later it was all the rage in the coffee shops, in the bazaars of Binondo. People did not even hide it—crowds of men, and not just students, not just boys, some women even, with their violent fans—gesticulating in public, throwing up their hands, putting up fists in debate. Put your knuckles where your mouth is. We were loud, obstreperous, heedless. We were literary critics. We were cantankerous: rude and raving. And no matter on which side you were, with the crown or the infidels, Spain or spoliarium, all of us, each one, seemed revitalized by spleen, hatched from the wombs of long, venomous silence.
And yes, suddenly a world opened up to me, after the novel, to which before I had been blind.
For instance, in my last days at the college, I heard a group of boys, young brats, some newly arrived from the provinces, say the talismanic name Maria Clara,343 and I joined in, casually, a senior with broader views. For, of course, like others, the romance had consumed me—especially I, vulnerable as you can imagine: the hero’s bitterness, his sarcasm in response to the woman’s lack of faith, the shallow alibis of her woeful confession as she professed engagement to another, to that pale monkey, that unggoy Linares (I saw him without any shred of doubt as that chess-playing fop in a passing carriage, on his way with her, even as I spoke, to Barcelona).
After all, who in his right mind believed that it was the sibilant priest with that skull-like face and obscene sigh who had changed her mind? It was a deft psychological trap, an empty chute engineered by the sly author, who knew I, the reader, would not be deceived. When at the end the books burned in
