He has a news fetish, my uncle.
I settled into my fallow years—that interregnum in Manila when I was not mind or matter, just a working lout in a colonial grind. It was not entirely unpleasant. I barely thought of my past, the vestiges of my childhood, and even of my education—all vanished like bubbles.368 I was a dead shrimp floating in the vapor of sinigang broth, with that semblance of the blush of life.
It was a relief.
I heard Agapito was still everywhere in Manila, busy compromising himself, but I never saw him. Like me, he’d taken lodgings elsewhere as his needs changed and funds decreased. Benigno regularly corresponded: he was doing well back home, teaching the catechism that passes for education in our blighted lands. He believes in it all, good old Sod. of the Virgin. Soon I heard that fine maestro de niños had a niño of his own, God bless the simple life, if you can get it. Up till now, when I think of poor Benigno—. I wonder what will become of his child. Here’s to hope, though I wouldn’t count on it.369 370
“Leandro” was kind enough to put in a good word for me at his boss’s other enterprise, as I said, at the Diario de Manila. A bunch of sullen workhorses kept me busy there. They matched my anomie. Yes, that neurotic printer Polonio, God rest his miserable soul, was among them, and Figura the alcoholic inker and Letra the tragic typesetter and a number of others whose names I have worked hard to forget and continue to muffle here in convenient sophomoric guises, just in case. Who knows, maybe none of the actual names they gave me were real anyway—all of them fictions to keep someone like me at bay.
It was hard to make friends among that tight-lipped crowd at the Diario—they ate lunch together and talked only among themselves, being all from Tondo while I was the lone Caviteño. Plus they hated my friend “Leandro.” It’s true that “Leandro” came and went with suspicious freedom, clearly a sycophant and snoop who did not have the guile to hide his purposes, but that should not have been reason to hate me, an innocent bystander in the subsequent mess. Apart from that, in the beginning I was still weak from cholera thus a bit addled in the brain. I still don’t believe I became entirely well. What impresses me now is the irony of it all—if they only knew then, now that history reveals its bitter sense of humor, I was on their side, for heaven’s sake!
As I said, I received the telegram from Miong when I got home from work. He was arriving the next day to stay with me at my boarding house. It’s always the case that the countryman in the city must accommodate those arriving from the provinces, no matter the state of your rooms.
Filipino hospitality is a curse.
My new rooms were, to say the least, not luxurious, out by the stinking bodegas near the back of the Bay. I was one of the last of our group from the Latinidad of San Roque to remain in Manila, and I don’t believe Miong would have had much to do with me otherwise, so separated had we become—he had gone up in the world, a full mayor, and I was a lowly apprentice, not progressing much, I have to say, at the printing press, just barely above the newsboys (and demoted to newsboy whenever I messed up, which was often in my blind state).
So I perceived in his telegram a note of desperation.
Still, I was honored. Even as kids we had called him munting kapitan.371 Now all of his wishes had come true, while I was barely functional at night, though quite cheerful in the day, especially after a cup of basi.
I met him at the pier, and strangely enough I felt this weird love at the sight of Kapitan Miong. Don Emilio Aguinaldo to you. No, I was not drunk. And no, I am no invert, bless their ravaged souls, as a number of girls in the melancholy hovels of Calle Iris372 373 will tell you, witnesses of my rash and generous exploits on their moody (also cockroach-ridden) mats. But the figure of Miong is the figure of my childhood: his is the face of my past.
I must admit, it’s not a gorgeous glass.
Miong has narrow eyes, they’re too close together, like bad neighbors. Not much of a forehead, with pointy ears, a bit ratlike. His face is pocked by smallpox, or is it beriberi? In later years, astride his horse and brandishing the magic sword he’d captured from a Spanish general early in the war, bearing that tragic brooding look that appears on all conquerors, he looked like a much better specimen of himself. But even Miong admits to a lifelong inferiority for being the runt of his family’s litter (plus, a maid dropped him on his head when he was three, you know, and in addition there was that fall he never recovered from during the mutiny of Cavite; anyway my point is his head always looked a bit—squashed).
But seeing him at the pier, I felt this overflow of sentiment, there in the breeze of the Bay, with the unshod grass merchants374 375 hauling out their wares, which smelled of my hometown—the earth of the provinces. From the bales of the zacateros, I smelled the rainwater hash of my uncle’s palay fields crawling with leechblood and beetlewings, damp with the humors of home.
Fresh, moist, and gritty.
The mud of the provinces lies in the gorges of Manila’s horses, and the aroma of horseshit is only the reverberation of provincial green. In truth I could not tell if it was the sight of Miong
