332 Sssh! (Trans. Note) (Dr. Diwata Drake, Katmandu, Nepal)
333 The illusions of Manila’s late nineteenth-century bourgeois were packed with inverse Baudelarian spleen: a kind of enraged louse-itch to gain access to the divine through exoticisms of place. Reciprocal diaspora of desire. The trade of textual wares is a trade of fetishes. Baudelaire Orientalized desire while the bourgeois of Manila Europeanized it, so that a symbolist-opiate Old-World squalor drenches old Manila’s dreams as a faux-Asia crawls in Charles Baude— (Dr. Diwata Drake, Paris, France)
334 Sssh! Do not disturb! (Estrella Espejo, ditto) (Trans. Note)
335 Oh no you don’t, Estrella. Sssh! (Trans. Note)
336 I cannot help it. The clatter of Quiapo echoes with Raymundo’s heartbreak in my sordid memory; eternally, Raymundo’s carretela horses expel their dung. When I was sixteen, the best and worst place to look for history books, novels, and atlases was the chaos around España—God, I wouldn’t even dare touch the fruit in the stalls—pocked with gnats and ancient flies! How many days did I spend scouring the stalls beyond the Bridge for dog-eared secondhand titles, Penguin carcasses, Picador corpses—the smell of horseshoes in the spines, the dust of worms on dust cov— (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
337 Ssh, Estrella! (Dr. Diwata Drake, Katmandu, Nepal)
338 Was it the Noli Me Tangere? (Trans. Note)
339 It may or may not be the Noli Me Tangere. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Havana, Cuba)
340 The secretly distributed, newly published novel Noli Me Tangere arrived via Hong Kong from the presses of Berlin in 1887 where the exhausted and penniless Rizal privately published the book with borrowed money. I don’t know about you, but it is impossible to imagine the novelty of that book. To me, the Noli’s meaning has vanished completely, and not just from the abuses of overreading—the friar-hatred is sawdust, the romance with Maria Clara is more irrelevant than a pairless slipper. And so I envy Raymundo Mata. And anyone who read that book with original passion. But then again, I envy even my younger self—the one who had read Karamazov for the first time, that fervent nihilist, my suicidal self, oddly full of life. I admit that I think with a pang of those times when I was sixteen and wandering the book stalls for my next fantastic find, not rebellious nor secret as the Noli, but still the next book was a possible thrill. And in this way, distant as I am from him, I imagine Raymundo reading a book. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
341 Ahem. Estrella. Now that you are done with your reverie and your shallow, unreliable understanding of this incurable masterpiece—allow us to read on! (Trans. Note)
342 Ditto. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Havana, Cuba)
343 Aha! So it was the Noli Me Tangere! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
344 It was a group mesmerism of an insane order, the reading of the Noli in 1887. Reading as hypnotism, a séance of a thing-that-was-not-dead-nor-absent therefore not resurrected nor unpresent, a raising of a thing-already-there. Noli me tangere—touch me not, as of a trauma, a hurt—was a magical imperative, impossible to resist, and a password to the country’s unconscious. Yes, it is true, as the savant says: it is the world of words that creates the world of things, and the nation is alas a mere text-temple. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Amherst, Massachusetts)
345 The samizdat nature of the distribution of the Noli—the tense secrecy of its reading—is untold. Historians agree on the Noli’s influence on Bonifacio (we’ve pointed out the Supremo’s fond reconstruction of a Fili episode in his first war effort), but the silent, awestruck chain of Noli readings, like a mass catenation of inconsummate arousal, is unglossed. I mean, the episode cannot compare at all to the long chain of names in the early eighties on the waiting list of the British Council in Manila for The Name of the Rose—but even that trivia has merited an essay! The act of reading as the single, most volatile revolutionary act does not occur in song or ode, and the image of a reader appears only once in a minor painting by Luna, master of the bourgeois still life. Whereas it seems to me akin to nothing that I’ve heard of, not even to the still-night readings of, say, The Gulag Archipelago—for the Soviet trauma has a distinctly morbid cast, being Russian, whereas the arrival of the Noli illuminates an almost naïve wonder—how a united solitude of reading created the portrait of a nation. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
346 The “united solitude” occurred mainly among the reading classes, but this does not lessen the power of the fantasy of nationhood: it underlines it. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Paris, France)
347 Sssh! (Trans. Note)
348 The Rizal novels contain the repertory of the nation’s Imaginary: consider it an aviary, a zoo of the country’s self-inventions—the Images that constitute that which we read ourselves to be. The writer Rizal most of all invented the repertoire of what the nation-coming-into-being hates and what it loves—the pea-fowl of Self-Deception; the mourning dove of Romantic Error; the lame duck of Pathetic Impotence; the Atheist grass-owl; and a whole slew of raptors—buzzards and buitres—in their cages of Concupiscence and Greed. True—the bestiary of Images contains also dysrecognitions: it is also possible that the nation was invented by the writer’s delusions. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Amherst, Massachusetts)
349 Oh, alligator of Analysis: shut up. Let Raymundo speak! (Trans. Note)
350 Ohoh, Ms. Translator: why so pikon at this moment, getting mad at your elders. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
351 Okay, okay, I’ll let the memoirist speak for himself, but may I say what a wonder it is to smell bagoong in the annals of revol— (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
352 Sssh! His point of view requires attention, I’m constantly footnoting in my head—how many monographs are buried in one turn of his phrases—and yet it’s not the history that demands silence—it’s the voice of the individual, not the hero—it dissuades analysis— (Dr. Diwata Drake, Trieste, Italy)
353 But first let me make just a few important notes on language: Churros y bibingka—throughout the writer uses indigenous
