Eyes at times green, or a prime blue, then in passing a blurred dash of gray, like those of a motile peregrine. I could not figure out that lady, the Scottish señora.435 What was it that ailed her? The talkative doctor’s stories must have influenced my imagination, as I thought she was a witch, a sprite, some kind of ambulant ghost. She wore black all through the journey, and yet, as far as I could tell from the conversation, no one had been buried. All I knew was that, if needed, I wanted to help. Sometimes she held her bosom as if a pain nailed her right at her heart. It was quite a bosom; I mean, it seemed quite a pain. Her mercurial eyes bewitched me, I will confess, but that’s because of my inexperience with the hypnosis of their changing colors. She walked with a commoner’s air, a swift peasant-like stride, and I noticed she cast her skirt between her legs sometimes in vulgar pique when she did not get her way at cards.
In short, her erotic mix of grieving sweetheart and senseless harlot aroused in me a sentiment I had felt profoundly only once before, in those dim drawing rooms of La Concordia, before that minx who, if I’d only known it then, held all the trumps. But unlike those days in Santa Ana, when I believed I was a hotshot scholar with a future, now I was a dull printer with a compromised life, my blood pledged to honor, death, and country, a secret revolutionary with no time for the inconveniences of love.
Are you kidding?
On that ship I didn’t think for a moment about my blood compact with the Supremo as long as the lady looked my way with some glimmer of recognition that at least I was human, and not just some blind lump this preposterous Don Procopio had taken in under his wing as a specimen of his kindness.
Here’s where I wished to God I had not been cursed to be held by the hand at night by a faithful servant, tapping with a kamagong cane along the way to the cargo hold, where we slept with husbandry, not wives, and though I had read a whole library of novels to comfort me in my debility, and I was a graduate of the Ateneo Municipal, and I could have enrolled in the University of Santo Tomas, if not for the outbreak of cholera not to mention the doldrums of heartbreak,436 and one day, after the revolution, I will travel to Australia like a brawny sailor, or maybe just to Andalusia, and drink of foreign waters with the temerity of a free man, still, the lady looked at me as if I were a mosquito, and sterile at that, without a sting to break her heart.
Not once did she call me by my name.
Instead, Rufino and I slunk back every night into our hold after making ourselves busy to others in the day—holding shawls and purses, pulling back chairs, respectfully doffing our hats, all those asinine kindnesses that never occurred to us we did not have to do. And I swear I could have been a hatstand or a footstool for all the lady thought about me: but this I realized, of course, in hindsight, not then. I lisped and preened and curtsied and, worst of all, accepted all of Dr. Pio’s lies. I didn’t even stop him when he began a tale about my burdened youth, when I was struck in the eye by a wayward friar, such fantasies of terror being apt to please the ladies. Instead, when asked in turn about my calamity, I bettered Dr. Pio and embellished the tale with a cause (undercooking the langka seeds, my master’s favorite snacks), specific weapons (a large spiky langka, no a bread knife, no a violent violin blade, including a whole culinary crescendo), curses (but I politely declined to illuminate the most venal), and harrowing denouement (bleeding, mucus-swelling, oh the flow of vitreous humor, and now this ineluctable night, my ravaged eye: sigh).
That was my most satisfying moment, when the lady looked at me with something close to tears, and then she outright sobbed.
We all stood up, concerned.
—It’s nothing, the lady said, just leave me. It just reminds me—
I was sad to think that she had perhaps experienced a childhood not different from my fantastic one, and I was almost ashamed to have deceived her, for I was, of course, a cherished nephew, while she, it turns out, was a cast-off child.437
So it was that we spent those days on ship, compounding deception with pity as we crept past the archipelago, all of us fooled by fate. For this trip, sleepy and uneventful, in which we docked without incident next at Capiz then in Iloilo, shedding our insipid cargo—pigs, cattle, and tobacco, sugar, goats, and candles—and not a single passenger from Manila to Zamboanga looking back to record our shadows—turned out to be a sensation, retold minutely and rehashed, questioned, quartered, and overdrawn. I wish for the life of me I could have taken care then to cut a finer, more striking swath. I mean, I bet a hundred pesos the doctor barely mentioned my name in his odious confessions, the scoundrel, and instead of being a major actor in a historic drama, I’m instead a minor detail in a hysteric’s act, doomed to molder in history books as some obscure blind man with a useless passion in the company of that lying Dr. Don Pio Valenzuela, future betrayer of the revolution.438
Whereas, in truth, what could history have become, if only someone had asked me?
430 I, too, have often been attacked by that shame, especially in
