383 “Ulang linalaki.” Were those the words in the original, Ms. Translator? Filipinos apply gender to rainstorms. Softly falling, steady, and long-lasting rain is feminine; shortlived, sharp bursts of rainfall are masculine. Ms. Translator? Come on, speak up—why am I doing your work?? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
384 Readers of Part Four, “The General in the Revolution,” keep expecting Raymundo’s bat’s-eye view of the “future encounters” between Emilio Aguinaldo, first president of the Philippine Republic, and Andres Bonifacio, founder and Supremo of the Katipunan. I’m still searching for those sheets. Ms. Translator—Ms. Translator, hoy! Wake up! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
385 Mariano Alvarez, father of Santiago, mayor of Noveleta, Cavite, and head of the Magdiwang group of Cavite’s katipuneros, opposed later to the Magdalo group of fellow Caviteño Aguinaldo, was a relative by marriage of the Supremo, Andres Bonifacio, an irrelevant detail, however, at this point in the narrative. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
386 If it’s irrelevant, can we not get into it? Let us read. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
387 Is he making fun of the noble Magdiwang hero Santiago’s digestive troubles, which may be traced to Santiago’s patriotic travails in the Revolution, when rebels had to hold in their guts in the midst of battle and eat the wild forest’s shoots and watermelons, foraging like animals in those uncertain days?! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
388 The flavor of the expression perhaps needs no translation: “naïve one” comes to mind as a mild evocation of his sarcasm; “idiot” is more accurate. (Trans. Note)
389 Oh good to hear from you, Mimi C.! Welcome back. P.S., the Katipunan password was Malamig, meaning cool, code for “all’s well.” (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
390 El gótico was the term for certain types of ghostly romances, a genre Raymundo scorns though it is clear that, like me, he read the tales. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
391 “. . . que charla como un chinche en la cabeza”: a mysterious phrase since bedbugs do not speak nor nestle in brains. (Trans. Note)
392 Oh, hello, Mimi C. Welcome back again!! (Estrela Espejo, ditto)
393 Supporting lead of Noli Me Tangere—clearly a better man than the lead character, the Spanish mestizo Ibarra, because Elias was a man of the people, an inspired revolutionary whose avant-garde venom could only have arisen from the oppressed lower classes. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
394 Please. Okay, I will interrupt my silence to tell you—the family history of Elias belies your one-dimensional analysis, Estrella! Elias was a dispossessed landowner, like Ibarra, thus placing him, like Ibarra, in the class of panginoong maylupa; this dark bandit was educated and (before his fall) bookish, like Ibarra. In fact, the trajectory of Ibarra’s biography follows that of the bandit Elias, the two being obvious literary doubles. Rizal regretted killing Elias in the Noli but coyly does not note that, in terms of literary economy, he killed him because his book did not need two of the same. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Hampstead Heath, London, England)
395 Oh yeah? You know more about the novel of Rizal than I, a Filipino who lives amid the country’s sweltering mangroves, suffering with the people, while you are a traveling wombat, fake diwata, a half-baked mestiza whose knowledge of the nation begins and ends with— (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
396 That is, Lance-of-Levity, or Comic Fencing Match. Noting the anagram (minus w), I curse you, dueling pair, Estrella and Diwata: dami kasi arte! Sssh! Let Raymundo speak. (Trans. Note)
397 That is: . . . ‘jo de puta . . . (Trans. Note)
398 Sssh to you, too! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
399 Miong’s nom de guerre was Magdalo, after the Magdalene, patron saint of Kawit. His men were also called Magdalo. Their fellow Caviteños, called Magdiwang, became their rivals in war. Modern-day rebels who invoke the Magdalo brand show a finely tuned irony and sense of history. The Magdalo of Cavite, loyal to Aguinaldo, began as a troop of perhaps idealistic rebels and ended up, well, shortsighted: history rightly judges them with harshness for KILLING THE SUPREMO! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
400 So this is the crux, the end of my patience. Enough, Estrella, enough. All readers of history are prey to this revolutionary postscript—dueling memoirs that arise from ashes of war. Magdiwang writers jumped the Magdalo to the gun: Artemio Ricarte and Santiago Alvarez, both Magdiwang, penned the first memoirs. Then that elegant stylist, Don Apolinario Mabini, damned Aguinaldo in sublime dudgeon. Miong Aguinaldo never recovered from Mabini’s prose style. It took him six decades before he published the Magdalo version of events (though before that the historian Agoncillo did function as his ventriloquist). But he was too late: by that time he was a villain, a schemer, and a murderer in the eyes of many (and to be honest, I agree). The point is: he became so not necessarily because of established fact but because he did not frame the narrative. The question of why Aguinaldo took so long to publish—The Mystery of The Tardy Memoir—is thought-provoking. His image as villain was convenient to Americans, the actual combat enemy. In this quarrel, Filipinos forget who their enemy was. Who benefits?! The Magdiwang case, the vilifying of Aguinaldo, suited the eventual occupiers (which does not mean that Magdiwang statements were untrue). Aguinaldo’s memoirs show he was, at best, an insecure egoist who lent his instability to others’ schemes. At worst, Bonifacio’s death points to him, however ambiguously, as party to murder. So the Interesting Case of the Dueling Revolutionary Memoirs may be no postmodern mystery. The first president of the Republic is, as we suspect, less than a hero, and his tardy recollections are acknowledgment of his failures. This does not lessen the following fact: Estrella’s agony is symptomatic, a fantasist’s angst. The Supremo Andres Bonifacio’s death rightly inscribes trauma—it is the emblematic wound of all Filipinos betrayed
