He had a long way to go.
However, I must say I did not envy him.
Despite my bravado, this is what I knew: I would be terrified to speak to the man. I was glad that I had not brought my copy of the Noli—no need to ask him then about an autograph and risk looking like an idiot. “Excuse me, Mr. Rizal, can I please have your signature?” What—was I a debt collector, tanga? “Ehem, Mr. Rizal, please sign this vegetable, I mean cabbage, I mean—lechugas!” Oh my gulay, God help!440
I mean, it seemed incredible, in fact, that he lived on that bobbing nonentity in the distance, now you saw it, now you didn’t, in the twilight of our vision looking most discomfitingly like, well, like every other island I had just seen.
The approach to Zamboanga was excruciating, and Rufino and I whiled away our time with the eighth sacrament (after baptism, matrimony, and extreme unction): cards.441
—They say he has a flying carpet, Rufino said, throwing down a jack of spades.
—Who? Didn’t you see my queen?!
—The German doctor. The one who will cure you.
—He’s not German. He’s from Calamba. And I’m not sick, you know. I’m just nightblind. Anyway, flying carpets are in fairy tales, Mang Rufino. Or at least the Chinese do not sell them in Manila. Ah, I’ll take that deuce.
I was beating him easily at the game, but Rufino didn’t notice.
—He can walk on water, you know.
—You’re mixing him up with Jesus. That’s in your gospel of San Geronimo.
—No, Segunda says so.
—Who’s Segunda?
I pretended not to know, though he and I knew full well who she was.
—The cook’s wife. The one whom I saw—
—Now Mang Rufino, it was dark and your eyes are old. Old age puts fevers in people’s brains.442
—No, Don Mundo, I saw—a woman showing—
—Showing what?
Rufino tossed his last card on the table, completing my winning hand.
—Showing the rich bat hole of the ace of spades,443 thus: the fleas of the vulva of the widow of espadañas!444 Que dios berdugo te bendigo!445
He was right.
May God the executioner have mercy on my soul.
I could not repent, for after all, what with my foolish hankering for an untouchable stranger, my sins were already multifold. And then there was Segunda, with the body of an angel and the squeals of a piglet, who helped in the galley, a kind of sous-chef coquette. She was a seasoned voyager, touchingly proud of her husband the cook, an amiable roughneck. In contrast with the English señora in widow’s weeds, Segunda the cook’s wife was jovial, you might say, almost to a fault: she giggled even when she came. But who can blame her? We were coupling by a cow.
I had met her in my errands for the ladies, going to and fro with glasses of lemonade and hot tea. Segunda used to trill as she butchered live animals, and her breasts’ fine trembling did justice to her violent songs. By the third day, she had taken pity on my poor glances, which caught her chest, I mean her eyes as she was mangling some soon-to-be capons, while her husband chewed betel off-duty with the sailors. Ah, her dexterous aggression with those blunted birds was enough to make a fellow feel for his own, to make sure they were there, and this I did with such tender distraction, acting thoughtlessly on my thoughts, that Segunda shrieked and hit me in the face with a basting tool. I bled. Then she brandished her bloody knife and laughed.
You might say a scene of carnage, not to mention her despotic glee, was not a good start to our communion. But while the ways of God are mysterious, those of humans are more so. Her gruesome humor turned me on, while she believed I was demented, so it was a good match, if you don’t count the adultery. With that nobility that marks her sex, Segunda did not even seem to mind, later on, the bovine nature of my lowly loft, and while you could not quite tell my grunts from those of our companions, I believe they were as happy for our union as we were to be rolling in their humid hay.
Segunda was from Dapitan. Despite a few demonic qualities, she had a knack for belief. She and Rufino, who wasn’t called mago for nothing, were birds of a feather, a pair of gulls. No matter how much I explained that it was impossible for a man, even a writer-ophthalmologist-zoologist, to walk on water on a handkerchief, Segunda clung to her declaration of his paranormal side.
—You’ll see, she said, when you meet him. He’s an aswang.
—No, said Rufino: more like a manggagaway.
—All those sick people who come for his magic, Segunda said: oculto.
—He’s an oculist, you dimwit, not an occultist!
—He can walk on water, Segunda repeated.
—You’re both crazy, I said. He’s a writer. Only Jesus walked on water, and even that is just hearsay.
—My son, please ask the German to cure you of your blasphemy. It’s worse than your blindness.
—He’s an aswang, muttered Segunda. He makes bats talk and knows the words that resurrect the soul. You’ll see.
Boy, that girl would not retreat. If you think about it, she herself was a kind of devil—she possessed an unconscious witchcraft under which any man would be glad to be victim, if you ask me. She had a fiery innocence, that Segunda: and her blend of foolishness and vigor only endeared her more to me. Sadly, she would not disembark with us but would remain on the boat with her blissful husband, happily mutilating poultry as she crooned her songs with lambent glee.
Meanwhile, the mourning American señora had now become more animated. As Zamboanga loomed and we coursed toward Dapitan’s inlets, she combed her hair lovingly and hummed songs in public. Josefina, as the grieving Swedish lady was called, now exuded perfume and cast off her
