In this way, the sticky leftovers and our late, hastily improvised lambanog carousing diverted us all night from the catastrophe we had just avoided.
When the Supremo’s house burned down during one of their sojourns (I believe to Kawit), it was as if our dire prophecies had been answered, though it was an accident, not intentional. From Cavite’s heights, the Supremo watched Tondo burn.414 Incidents like these kept plucking at our nerves. The Supremo bore his misfortune with stoic resignation (as Miong, his assiduous host in Kawit, reported). Okay for the Supremo to be so calm, since he had already read all his books, but I mourned the secret pamphlets I had yet to read, the novels charred to smithereens, and all those hapless things.
I kept thinking of El Filibusterismo in the secret bookcase under its scalloped cloth. I volunteered to check out the ruins, just in case, but his friend, the doctor from Bulacan, had already done everything he could, and all I could offer the poor Supremo was a rambling, garbled telegram of distress from my gloomy perch in Manila.
I don’t know what came over me as the days advanced. I had the worst feelings of withdrawal—an urge to turn hermit and close out the world.
Who was I to pledge my soul to my country?
On the streets, Guardia Civil officers whipped me when I failed to greet them, and woe to me if I failed to show my cédula to any old crank with a badge. True, my situation as an indio415 on the islands was craven, and if my heart were in the right place daily I should cry havoc against Spain.
But really, I was no rebel, no man of arms.
I was a distracted bookworm who would much rather be sailing off to Parma, wherever that was, to drink absinthe, whatever that is, in a derelict abbey of alcoholic Carthusians, whoever those damned fools are. I waited for fires of wrath to burn in me at the thought of my country’s sorrows, but mainly, if I were truthful, all I had was a dim passion for irregular verbs.
I remember one afternoon I kept leafing through a French dictionary I had found in a bookstall on Azcarraga. I found in it not companionship but a hoax, a false dream of brotherhood, but still I felt bound to the volume, there in the doorway of the bookstall, wanting to devour—yes, weirdly munch on—the book’s dry, uncut pages. Those days, I kept feeling this phantom hunger, a subtle intermittent sensation gnawing crosswise through my spleen. I sat through a book of medicinal plants and a tedious missal in Latin that illuminated the oppression of the Lenten season. The bookseller, a phlegmatic Hindu, had an embarrassed cough, as if he knew his wares were pathetic; but he was a kind man who let young men like me peruse his trash without trouble.
Random corners of learning were all Manila’s stalls had to offer, cursed as they were by censors and an indifferent trade. In these I found cold comfort, but comfort just the same: maps, dusty dictionaries, a rat-gnawed atlas. These were my talismans, not bloody bolos with my blood on it.
Of course, like everybody else, I was left with those articles in stupid Spanish periodicals, nothing but echo chambers of the kumbento, the pulp of pulpits. I don’t mean the illustrated magazines, El Mundo Ilustrado and such, with their shiny pictures of Madrid fashions (fantastic hombres in ombré, absurd albinos in grisaille); albums of ornate continental hairstyles, smacking somewhat of ornithology; exotic travelogues through Havana, Borneo, and Sarawak, which all anyhow looked like the rice fields of Bulacan.
I will admit: these monthlies gave rise to an insidious self-loathing and were at best an absorbing poison. My uncle, ceaseless castigator of the material world though an avid scanner of its ills, had always said: those magazines are the devil, worse than taxes! At the same time he kept them, piled up inside carved mahogany trunks. But I’ve always been fascinated by those ghoulish European supplements, for instance, which catalogue reptiles in that far-off planet Jardin des Plantes and count our own carabao with aurochs and bison of brutish wonders.
I could not bear to see the armchair sights of Madrid, imagining K wandering through its cobbled lures; but I could admire Rome’s rotting masonry, houses vaster than the horse stables that the Augustinians kept at Imus. I marveled at the city of Paris, veritable Babylon of desire. True, the Seine was perhaps no more pleasant than the Pasig, but what a view, spanning an area greater than Tanza, Noveleta, and Maragondon combined, even if you included Mount Buntis!
I did note the pompous pamphlets, pustulant tirades in La Politica and El Resumen,416 and damned sketches and brushstrokes417 from those deformed wits, the Spaniards Quioquiap and Retana—they were the true reptiles in our pages; but really, I skimmed over their venom. My interest was sluggish, though persistent. Yes, yes, was it too much to ask that they burn in hell, roast slowly like tender piglets in their own putrid fat? Every night, like everyone else, I prayed to God that those scoliotic rightist cuckolds would die, those clerical leeches. I dreamed of pickling them in posthumous brine, so that their malformed souls could be served with salt and red tomatoes to the masses, and at times I’d wake with an acid taste in my mouth. To be honest, soaking them like balut was an insult to the ducks.
Yes, yes, I wished to kill Father Font, Quioquiap, Cañamaque, and every single rabid pervert in La Politica de España en Filipinas. It was strange, but more than my own daily actual mortifications at the hands of Spanish creeps, it
