427 Harsh! Set aside like aphorisms in the text, exergasia, that is, the repetition of a thought in different words, is clearly one of Raymundo’s favorite tropes, used most effectively when describing the nobility of early revolutionaries, as opposed to latecomers, like the alliteratively named villain, Pedro Paterno, who in Raymundo’s mind ruined the country. This frequent duplication of a favored truism may strike some as merely tautological, the equivalent of a rhetorical flea, but here I believe his exergasia is suitably orgastic, not pedantic. Mimi C., Mimi C., what do you think of my translator’s analysis?! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
428 In this chapter, Raymundo’s memoir, this vessel of Memory seems to me a drowning bark in the sea of History, tossing up to our scrutiny one more blight upon its waves: our short attention spans. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
429 Goddamnit! Silence, Estrella! Your words hold no candle to his flame. (Trans. Note)
Entry #30
June [1896]
We were to journey for at least five days, so I was to prepare food, linen, and reading material for quite a span of shipboard boredom. I was used to the quick hauls from Cavite to Manila on the ychaustis, those rickety boats you could not quite call steamers; I imagined that the large inter-island vessels that reached as far as the Jesuit posts in Mindanao must be infinitely more comfortable.
It was not to be so, when I got on. I did not have enough money to book Rufino and me on the passenger deck (for one thing, I had spent my last bits on the dry French dictionary mentioned earlier, one of those impulse buys it’s best not to regret—though you can’t help but feel stupid, cursed with that post-purchase shame that goes with the satisfaction of owning a useless book).430
Dr. Pio, comfortably lodged, with his fine medical bag on prominent display, was already on speaking terms with a number of katsila with whom he played checkers and some Filipino ladies with whom he played quite the gentleman, damn his smug clinical air.
Rufino and I had to make do with the smell of copra and coconut oil in the rancid belly of the stinking boat, sleeping with its cargo of cows and pigs.
Fortunately, we were free to wander the decks, where we observed the mad penchant of ladies, Spanish and Filipino alike, for the game of panguingue at all hours, and the truculent pigments of a quadrille of foreigners who traversed the ship in scowling formation. I followed them in exuberant proximity, aping their furrowed brows for Rufino’s amusement and feeling that manic expansion of spirit that occurs as a ship leaves anchor. But Don Pio,431 ever cautious secret revolutionary with a smug pistol in his pocket, soon put a stop to that entertainment, and told us to follow him instead in his promenade. This we did, and I soon found in this venerable doctor a gaping cauldron of monotony. My God, it was like walking with a sulphurous well! His vaporous fund of aphorisms was soon depleted, and I envied Rufino his mute status, not having the need to join in chitchat, letting the upper classes play the buffoon in the singsong dialect of their Spanish, or in candid Tagalog when a Spaniard passed by.
Later, we came upon three of the aforementioned ladies of the passenger deck, one of them in mourning, a plump, handsome foreigner.
—Don Procopio, the ladies greeted Dr. Pio.
—I was just relating to these two men the uses of hypnosis.
I was surprised by the doctor’s awkward prevarication—he was the worst liar, I thought, coming up with the stupidest possible tales.
Why bring up hypnosis if he could talk about waltzes or sunsets?
What a dunce.
The ladies eagerly asked for elaboration.
He had given himself a false name and occupation, a precaution neither Rufino nor I, poor obscure souls, required.
He styled himself Don Procopio Bonifacio, a dealer in medical books, especially of treatises on optics.432
I felt bad for the Supremo’s brother, the real, earnest Procopio, a wistful kid from Tondo whose simple image was so swindled by this unctuous persona.
The arts of mesmerism, magic tricks by candlelight, coin-swapping and earwigging and casual disappearing acts with a gun—nothing was beyond this coy counterfeit Procopio with his holster of tricks.
The ladies found delight in his tales of occult shamanism among Sarawak tribes, the medicine men of Patagonia, even the rank foolishness of the Englishman Darwin’s Theory of Apes.
I, on the other hand, could only glare at the extravagant fool. He performed for the ladies in a way he had not bothered with me and Rufino, transformed from a trite dolt into a succubus of tales.
—Tu un daldalero, Señor,433 Rufino muttered in his wake, spitting out Chabacano with his betel, splat on the deck.
But flattered by the attentions of the women, Dr. Pio was deaf to our wet compliments.
The foreign lady, I have to tell you, was striking. She looked like Jezebel, if you ever imagined Jezebel in grieving weeds. Or maybe she was Venus, avatar of our rickety ship and in her comeliness an ironic personification of our vomitous vessel.434 She had long, unkempt tresses, a bit like a mermaid’s, sometimes reddish, sometimes gold, and green eyes. She kind of smelled, a bit—a bit sultry, like the unwashed lavanderas of my early acquaintance, down on Calle Caraballo. But no, I must have been mistaken—that whiff of the body must have been my own glands of the devil at work. At first sight, in clothes like a widow’s, the lady seemed old: but on closer inspection, she was probably barely a teenager, like the third woman, a child introduced as Angelica.
The other Filipina, who seemed to be in charge, was Doña Sisa.
Soon it was that we accompanied these women on the decks, to and fro in slow pageantry, the doctor with his hands at his back, circling the ship with an easy garrulity, and Rufino and I, sick man and sick man’s helper, playing the roles of fine
