Miong, in a neatly pressed barong and linen pants, looked strangely expectant and disappointed at the same time. He stood at the dock with his belongings, a petite petate376 377 378 379 380 tied in an expert bundle around a cloth suitcase, next to his faithful servant Rufino, my distant cousin.
Miong already wore that mournful glimmer that I recognized from our childhood by the Binakayan waters: a kind of meditative ill humor that made all who were less aggrieved throw in their lots with him, just in case.
It was an odd charm he had, the ability to make everyone else fall in with his temper’s whims, as if they could for sure right the wrongs against him.
I felt again my boyhood concern over the cloud about his face.
—Bulag! At last!, he growled.
He greeted me with that childhood name, which no one had called me in eleven years. For no good reason it sounded like an endearment, albeit the familial kind: a nasty affection.
—What is it? What happened?, I said.
He took me aside and spoke in a whisper.
—Bulag, can you believe—that pilot over there—that starving old fisherman. Acts like the bastard of a Spanish priest, like those sons of devils I knew in Letran. He does not know who I am—a gobernadorcillo of Cavite. Didn’t he see my cane, with the insignia of a kapitan? Treats me like a servant.
—What did he do?
—He made me move my bags when I got on the boat—told me to take my mat and shove it. Rufino had to carry everything on his lap all the way to the shore.
—But maybe you were blocking the ladder, blocking other people’s way in?
—Bah, they’ll see. One of these days, they’ll know who I am. Make sure you get his name. I will report him. He can’t get away with this. I know the owner of that ship.
—Sure, Miong. Sure.
Old Rufino Mago, son of a farmhand of my grandfather, embraced me in the way Miong failed to do. Town rumor had it that Rufino was descended from criminal Mexican sailors who had jumped ship on a trip from Acapulco. He was a Chabacano ruffian whose strange pidgin Spanish endeared him to no one. Now old and gnarly, he held me close to him in a peasant hug, a provincial warmth I missed but could not wait to wriggle out of.
—Ah, hijo de puto! E tu un buta como paniqui ya!
Ah, son of a bitch—or rice cake? And I bet still blind as a bat!
Or something like that.
How could you not hug the old man back?
Rufino and I went off to see the surly pilot.
One could see from the pilot’s bulging arms that he had worked at this trade from childhood—a growling master of Manila’s shoals, a raw talent at the oars. His face was red and wrinkly from life in the open air, and he grumbled about the weather, which portended rain, while Rufino paid their fare for the banca. The cranky pilot, probably a Batangueño, settled at half a real, plus so much for the bags. All that fussing over some kusing.
I always turn away from scenes of haggling, embarrassed especially to argue over the skills of men upon whose talents our lives depend. What’s your name, I mumbled. Betong, he said. Betong Rivera, from Bai.381
Our duty done, we left him.
Soon enough, as our charred old Charon had predicted, it began to rain.
Did you tell him I know his boss?, Kapitan Miong barked.
We nodded, lying.
Settled in the kalesa, Miong directed us exactly how to arrange his bags behind the horses, Rufino and I soaking in the wind. Miong had the knack of a born leader, I always admired it. He compelled action while he remained idle—and dry—and we obeyed everything he said. The pilot Betong gave us a good fare, Mang Rufino reported in the wind, spoken in reproof of his master, I thought, who sat stiff, erect and unresponding, as we got into the kalesa, and the driver shook the horses, and we drove off.
I asked Miong what took him to Manila, but he put his finger to his lips and asked instead about the different arrabales—in which direction was Trozo, Tondo, and Binondo, as well as Meisic and Santa Mesa, as if he were here on a tour of Manila’s suburbs and had never studied right in its center, at San Juan de Letran. Come to think of it, he had barely been at Letran before he had dropped out to become a comerciante,382 so maybe he was not feigning but genuinely wanted to know. We went by the coast, and the rain made the Malecon even moodier and the walls of Intramuros creepier, but once inside the gates I perked up.
I showed him the stones of the Ateneo, and the majesty of the Palacio, then my old boarding house on Magallanes, that tragic site of adolescent romance, the exact, mortifying details of which I mercifully kept from my old friend (who could have cared less anyway—he’s always been pragmatic, impatient with fantasies that were not his). Miong was impressed by the statues and the gardens but like every visitor to Manila he said it smelled.
Rufino, on the other hand, soaked it all up, including the vapor, his mouth open. Down through the Puente de España into the Escolta and its lace-like lamps in the distance, I couldn’t help share the old servant’s awe, as we passed the colored paper lights and macabre made-up faces of bold European women in the shops. Manila always moves me if I am in the right frame of mind. The rain, just as suddenly as it had begun, stopped—jerky masculine clime.383
Now a romantic gauze filled the city, and the sun tippled the skies into mauve. The Bay fell behind us, drunk on its glamor. There where my dashed heart had upset the fruitsellers of
