411 At some point, will the wild Chabacano servant Rufino Mago’s memoir appear? Is it covered in the dust of a baúl somewhere awaiting resurrection? I can’t wait. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
412 Prophetic words from Supremo. Hah, take that, Aguinaldo. Assassin!! Bastard! Not to mention the sorrows of our current days! Okay. Now I got that off my chest. Let Raymundo speak. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
413 A monthly magazine favored by the bourgeois classes. Santiago Alvarez in his memoir The Katipunan and the Revolution, recalls this incident but unlike blind Raymundo retells it for a noble purpose—to show the Supremo’s brotherly love! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
414 Manila’s fires were habitual. It’s sad. The wooden material and thatched roofs of the ever-crowding, ever-loyal city has always been a hazard. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
415 Just to correct, then I will let the reader read on: he was not technically an indio. Raymundo Mata was, of course, mestizo: half-Basque, quarter-Chinese, quarter-Filipino. This acceptance of a single identity for the nation is important. It is the great legacy of revolution. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
416 For those who are not in the know, that is, everyone: La Politica de España en Filipinas as well as El Resumen and others were conservative papers popular among the abusive Spaniards of Manila. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
417 Esbozos y Pinceladas: published in 1887, these were compiled articles of the hated Pablo Feced, or Quioquiap, Spanish writer and enemy of the Propaganda Movement. Posterity, remember his name and spit on it. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
418 A spirit erroneously ascribed here to Blumentritt, these sentiments are Rizal’s, who, in his letters to Del Pilar, expresses candid disdain for propagandists who preach to Spaniards instead of to Filipinos. Other errors: M. Calero, Carmelo, and L. O. Crame are not three men but one—Marcelo H. Del Pilar. Though to his credit, Del Pilar’s energies did have the air of multitudes. Dimasalang and Laong-Laan are both pen names of Rizal (Dimasalang was his Masonic name; Laong-Laan [Ever-Ready] is a boring choice though an intriguing comment on rebellion). It should be noted that Raymundo remembers names and titles of the Propaganda Movement as any ordinary reader would—with sloppy affection, idolatry and rumor all mixed up. Who could blame him? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
419 Mix-up of titles again: Dasalan at Tocsohan and Me Piden Versos were by different propagandists—Del Pilar and Rizal, respectively. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
420 Happily, no trace of Raymundo’s poetry seems to have survived. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
421 Dr. Diwata? Dr. Diwata, are you there? What do you make of— (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
422 Let Raymundo— (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
423 —speak. Okay, okay. Your silence rebukes, and yet—my heart must speak. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
Entry #29
June [1896]
In the midst of these preparations, I experienced this one interlude of attachment—I’ll tell it now, because I know that that memory, too, will be lost.
A few days before my departure, in the middle of the night, before curfew, I heard his steps—familiar, the solid clop of his soiled shoes.
Agapito’s swift gait, like a horse fed molasses without water. He took refuge in my rooms before the Guardia Civil’s call; and my reunion with my old friend struck me then—as it does now—as a leitmotif, the plangent chord of war.
Allow me to digress here on tardy prophets, those clever historians who praise in hindsight the glories of Napoleon’s birth or young General Washington’s first wobbly steps. Craftsmen of Truth, who cobble grandeur out of childish acts, unaware that Historians are mere Tools: hoary handmaidens of what some call Victory, and others Darn Luck, or Genocide, depending on whose side their wits survive. The biographies of heroes are only a conqueror’s postscript, anachronistic addenda to battles. Who records the tender curls of Pyrrhus’s massacred enemy, or the portentous squalls of the gurgling baby who grew up to be the extremely large Goliath?
Only the Greeks, those classical souls, recall the history of the damaged Cyclops.
While I, dear reader, wish to inscribe here, as warriors monger and scalawags surrender, the intemperate, perhaps insane, saga of Agapito, who will live on, I am sure, on the lips of his countrymen.
Through my efforts, admiring fellowmen will certainly reward him424 with, if not a majestic tomb against a crabby lawn, at least a musical composition by Julio Nakpil, one of those endless habaneras that always puts me to sleep.
In short, let me write about Agapito while I wait for the boat to Dapitan to arrive.
I call this segment “Agapito and the Sailors, or, Notes toward a Kundiman,” with apologies to Homer.
As I said, Agapito did not flow with the times—he preceded them.
He was always in a hurry, and on that night he arrived in a flurry of chimes—tinkling, tinkling along, carrying his photographer’s rack and settling against the door with an asthmatic sigh. Gone were the bobbing Adam’s apple, the lavish facial hair. Now he had the haphazard hygiene of one who could barely shave, much less wax a four-inch mustache. His former bohemian look was altered; his eyes were old.
It occurs to me that you measure your age from the faces of your friends, and I am sorry to say his miserable look was not comforting to me.
On the other hand, who knows if my own face gave him that look of pain, as if in me he were witnessing his futile posterity right before his eyes?
I stumbled from bed in the dark, a stark paranoid insomniac, and I was so relieved to find it was only Agapito at that hour, and not the Spaniards out to get me, that I broke some of his photographic mirrors in my joy.
His mission was secret and urgent, something about ocean divers, capiz shells, and Australia.
I cannot divulge its full intent, and so I throw into this list at least one red herring for spies out there who read with
