And I did go to one debate, in a well-appointed home by the river. I didn’t know anyone and was surprised some were—so old. They smoked cigarettes and drank chocolate, not liquor; it was merienda hour, with servants (the only women, though some wives and sisters appeared later) going in and out to heap our plates. After all the doughnuts and rice cakes,353 I was a bit drowsy, I admit.
But frankly I got bored.
They brought up names, events, and sequels to arguments I did not know the beginnings of, even addenda to incidents that happened in 1875! Please, I wanted to scream—it’s 1892, may we please leave the medieval age and get back to the modern world?
It seemed to me I shared nothing with these garrulous men except my country, and I rehearsed my refusal to Agapito: I’m very sorry, friend, I would have to tell him, but I could never become a Mason. You guys bore me to death.
Plus, they barely mentioned the books. One, clearly a learned man, maybe a lawyer, had the gall to say, with that smirk of the connoisseur when he’s coming up with a canard, that the second novel read like a rehash of the romances of Eugène Sue. I was outraged, but more so because I was a loser who had not yet read the book in question, something about masked jewelers and subversion (admittedly, a plot in Eugène Sue—but all the more reason to read it!).
The orator was a shriveled thing, wearing a shawl like a woman, and in a few years, I thought, people would have to carry him around like a child. His brain bulged from his receding hairline, like a dislodged piece of stone. Though from the silence it was clear his was not a general consensus, or even an understood one, no one had the courage to contradict him, partly because he spoke very good Spanish, I thought, but mainly because, well, he looked like a cripple.
But one man grew red.
He was the best dressed of them, as if going to a dance when all the rest came in plain clothes. He even had a handkerchief in his lapel that he kept folded, rigorously ironed, stiff like a chunk of armor.
—You have a right to your opinion,354 the man said, deeply flushing, but I must challenge you to a duel for your thoughts.
I admired this man, and weeks after I’d repeat his self-righteousness to myself, savoring the boldness of his exclamation.
Murmuring came from the crowd, some got up to shield the shrunken lawyer, and an aging gentleman laughed and patted the other man on his handkerchiefed lapel, with condescension.
That laughter dispelled the tense moment, then more puto came and everyone used the occasion to gorge on the cakes and ogle Orang, the skinny serving girl who, and I did not imagine it, kept brushing against me to pour chocolate for everyone else.
To be honest, if it weren’t for the serving girl Orang, who looked disturbingly like K, except darker and with something of a harelip, and who kept plying me with puto and bibingka as if I were about to be executed, the event would not have been memorable.
She was a spindly thing, but wild, with an amorous invention that, I must confess, at first scared me. I saw her off and on weeks after.
The detritus of my political debut.
She was infinitely more satisfying.
And now that I have reached this filthy topic, I will confess that my experience, not meager but, let’s say, discontinuous, had always been of the paying kind, furtive and stinky. (Around ten centavos the first time, on Calle Caraballo with Anday’s nasty cousin, Milagros the unmiraculous,355 visiting from Tayabas; she jerked me like a chocolate-churner, a damned insensate batidor, and I thought then it was always supposed to hurt, like being dragged on pumice. The third encounter, with a hag near the sewers of the Elcano pawnshop El Conquistador, was not such a conquest, but by that time I had learned the places where women kind of squeak, in another manner of speaking, and I would have finished all right, too, if not for the prayers of contrition in advance from whispering Benigno, next in line, his holy ejaculations at the door distracting my premature ones.)
For me, a blind boy in dark places, these acts were full of sounds (slaps and apathetic grunts), smells (rancid adobo made of withered pork, always perversely sweet), touch (lumpy legs like slabs of chorizo stuffed into veiny webbed sacs; breasts of different shapes and sizes, sometimes on the same woman; pubic hair like dried bihon; scaly stomachs; eel-like spines; gobs of gooey fat like rehashed miki), and lastly taste (myrrh, gold, and what the heaven is that frankincense?!).
But only Orang’s body did I see.
She was smooth, chocolate-skinned, and it was a marvel above all to see her belly button, that childish whorl the like of which will not appear again on another body. I had never seen a person up so close, in the light, and she let me do anything I wanted. What most moved me is that she offered to me openly those secrets of her young body—with a sort of vacuity, yes, a mental imbecility, and she certainly was not untouched, with a puerile looseness that might translate, later on, into that cackling vulgarity of certain insatiable wise women, but at the time, to me, her lewdness was sacerdotal, a mystical pact with an unworthy beast, and I, a dumb bat with no future, could only be grateful.
Orang, I’m grateful still.
Between and after (young Orang and I drifted apart, having nothing in common but mortal sin), I dallied in other pursuits while I awaited destiny’s interruptions. I took a job at a printer’s place to bide the time before my uncle’s palay harvest.
