Alas, he nixed my hopes for Europe: for my own good, he said.
He was conservative to the end.
Long after the Cavite Mutiny, as I have said, my uncle had relinquished the public life to settle down on the farm with his father, the raving ex-soldier. My grandfather Don Raymundo Mata Eibarrazeta was now a hundred years old, who knows—nagging relic of a damned past, or so say the propagandists. He lurched and rumbled through the planting season, tearing up rice seedlings in his careless way, then he wandered into peasants’ hovels when it rained, addressing them with the familiar tu in his ridiculous speech, or so I imagined.
Townspeople laughed at the enormous Basque behind his back, so friends report. No one had the conscience to imagine he was a bit tender in the brain, in his enlarged head. Instead, they whispered in nasty gulps: it served him right to go blind from the ravages of “that other cholera,”356 by which God had demolished the old officers of the infested Cavite fort. Chismosas and malditas!
However, it’s true: my grandfather was not just sick, as far as I could tell from the gaps in my uncle’s letters, delicately evasive about the man’s genetic lapses. He was also a kinetic, thriving waste of a man—full of gasps and furors in his sightless frenzy as he wandered the farm in fluent idiocy, ranting at the world in the words of gypsies rambling down Europe’s Pyrenees.
Hard to ignore, and obviously a burden.
As for my uncle, on a less grand scale, changing the topic: he had arthritis and bouts of rheumatism, poor soul. He could do with some help. I knew I should return home. Instead, I wrote to say I would visit him before going on to more study at Santo Tomas, though I had no idea what I wanted to be.
While I waited for my ticket home, he referred me to “Leandro,” of all people, my old landlady Señora Chula’s son, now a married man with inaccurate memories of our past. My uncle hoped “Leandro” could get me a job and “put [me] to good use, away from collegiate ungulates.”357 358 359 360 361
As a mark of goodwill, “Leandro” secured me a temporary position as a printer’s assistant at the Frenchman La Font’s, a sooty bodega outside the walls, between Calles Madrid and Barcelona. I wept to think that these street signs would be my lone simulation of travel, the closest I would get to the life of K.
It was the gesture of a kinsman, a fellow Caviteño. I professed thanks to “Leandro” and reflected duly on the ironies of life. For one thing, the old bully of our youthful hostel had become a sentimentalist, full of unwarranted nostalgia and stuck with countless brats of his own whose mere existence, I suspected with pity, constituted my ample revenge.
In any case, it suited me, the printer’s work: slogging with ink’s innards, the mechanical grease of types, and the constant revelations of the haphazard life of words—you missed one letter and changed the world (not to mention your paycheck), and the irate client demanded a refund of the wedding invitations, because instead of marrying a postman she was allying with a ram.362 363 It still burns me that for this unwitting witticism the otherwise congenial Señor La Font docked me a whole real.
One day I received the telegram I had been waiting for.
Tio U. told me he was expecting me home, and he enclosed the ticket.
My life in Manila was over, and despite certain garish aspects of the walled city, I fell into a fever, sweats, and dejection. Suddenly, although it was not news, I felt a desperate sense of loss: to think of returning to creeky Kawit, beloved as it was, while all portents pointed to an earthquake in the city, and everyone else was packing off to thrilling adventures (even timid Benigno was awaiting a new life, his first post as a maestro de niños, after having passed his exams), and my nervous fancy, I was not even twenty years old, had risen to this intolerable pitch, and everything—a rotting store sign, the smell of batshit, Orang’s rump, the implausibly gaudy sunsets of Bagumbayan—seemed made just for my trembling, so that I mourned the sight of everything I saw, as if the city would crumble when I was gone.
I was like a man with cancer: my impending departure struck me extravagantly as a death knell.
It turns out I had the cholera.
I spent my last days in Manila vomiting my guts out in a wrenching farewell. The doctor pronounced my form “mild” and proceeded to bleed me to death. It is the vanity of youth to despair that life is short and the comfort of age to hope it is so. I wrote out garish deathbed slogans into a trembling notebook.
However, much to my surprise, I got better.
In the meantime, Agapito my roommate seemed more agitated than ever, and I must say I began to hate him, his bustling clarity and secret life, all his obscure ambitions that were falling into place.
He was preoccupied, ecstatic.
The magical glow of a man of purpose has something obscene about it, especially from the vantage of a sick observer with poison in his bowels. When he came in one day, eyes wide, in tears, distraught like a puppy just whiplashed, I had it in my heart to laugh at him.
Until he told me the news.
All this while he had been preparing for a momentous event.
I couldn’t believe it.
The Writer himself was arriving.
No, the Writer had arrived—yes, he, the Novelist from Heidelberg, from Barcelona, wherever the heck he had been studying to be an optician,
