That was my first reading, a bit juvenile, and I could barely say the words right, in a rush as I was, as if blood were pumping out of my heart in rapid time with my nervous locution—I was so excited to speak. The callow boys at the Ateneo looked at me in awe (I thought), because, of course, they had never been in love.
It turns out, they were not talking about a book at all but a seedy hangout on Calle Soler in Santa Cruz.
I blush now at that memory, my dumb figure—shaking magus in Jesus’s temple: obviously a boy who had been dumped. At least those students didn’t know my tragedy had happened fourteen months ago. In retrospect, I suspect that when I left the courtyard the fresh-faced boys laughed hysterically behind my back.
Still, I rushed into other debates, for instance first with Benigno, that budding pedant, and then with Agapito, that vessel of passion, that toy of conviction, when he moved into my rooms.
Remembering Father Gaspar’s cryptic injunction—“throw it away to someone else,” so that in this manner the book traveled rapidly in those dark days of its first printing, now so nostalgically glorious, though then I had no clue that these were historic acts, the act of reading,344 345 346 347 or that the book would become such a collector’s item, or otherwise I would have wrapped it in parchment and sealed it for the highest bidder, what the hell, I only knew holding the book could very likely constitute a glorious crime—in short, I lent it to Benigno.
He was appalled by the novel’s blasphemy; he was shocked. He could barely read on after the philosopher’s harangue in Chapter XIV.
—But Benigno, I said, outraged by his hypocrisy, you’ve read seventy pages already!
He had clutched his rosaries and the scapulars around his neck and prayed the Ave Maria every time he came to a sinful passage. The Virgin heard many prayers from such critics. But I argued it was a reverent book, a book of true piety and devotion. Looking up from shredding his mother’s newly delivered batch of dried squid, Benigno stared at me as if I had had too much of his father’s lambanog.
—How so? Come on, Padre Damaso, he challenged, explique!
In his excitement Benigno did not notice the choice tentacles sticking out from his ridiculous incisors.
I exhibited three proofs: Chapter XVIII, Almas in Pena; Chapter XXXI, El Sermón; and, I nodded to the skeptical Benigno, the penultimate chapter, El Padre Dámaso Explica. In each clearly, I said, a true sense of religion in the writer contrasts against the corruption of the organized kind. The deranged mother Sisa’s devoutness reproaches the sacristan mayor’s cruelty, not God’s; the pomp and spectacle of the fiesta sermon is a sacrilege only to vanity, not to faith; and in the last, the pathetic speech of the adulterous priest Dámaso, we have the religious figure being all too human, not a scandal against God but a sketch of human weakness; and ergo, en fin and in summation, the book pictures not the fall of God but the fallibility of man.348 349 350
As I spoke, rather eloquently, I thought, and quite proud of my rhetorical semi-colons, Benigno cut up the mackerel and opened up his father’s haul of crabs with increasingly violent disagreement.
Agapito grunted.
—Bah, humbug! Agapito said. The book reveals to us what we all know but dare not speak: God is dead in the Philippine islands!
Benigno stopped in the middle of denuding a female crab’s womb of her ripe eggs.
I stared at Agapito’s luxurious mustache, now greasy with fish oil.
I realized then that Agapito was somehow changed—it wasn’t just his modish facial hair, his newfound, and a bit scary, intensity, or the surprising dogmatism of his pronouncement. There was an air about him—fleetingly so, mind you, I couldn’t quite pin it down—of a man in a rush, of a being about to go someplace else more important.
This is the boy who used to cower in the boarding house at the mere arrival of “Leandro,” who prayed to God to deliver him from the wrath of the local gangsters on Calle Caraballo! Now he spoke with a sense of destiny, with strange oracular certainty—with, I must add, an irrelevant temerity, as witness that scene at the Japanese bazaar in Binondo, in which it was his whipping out of a pamphlet, completely out of the blue and not quite appropriate to the occasion, that began the famous fight.
If it weren’t for the fact that he with Benigno had been a bona fide member of the Sodality of the Legion of Mary, way back at the Latinidad in San Roque, a devout group not even I, at the time not such a slouch in the ways of God, had been admitted to—
I would have sworn he’d become a Mason.
—It’s clear the author has found the true path of enlightenment not in religion but in the works of man. He’s an atheist, pure and simple, a materialist with a cause. We should all follow his example!
Benigno gasped, and the crab’s carapace clattered on the tin plate.
My God, I thought, Agapito was a Mason.
—He wrote the novel to free us from our bondage to superstition and show us the truth: how to correct our society. I mean, come on, didn’t you read the introduction?
—Maybe that’s all you read, Agapito, I sputtered. You can’t pulverize a novel to that base reduction. It’s not only about correcting society. What about the jokes, the ironical asides, the living
