I gave up.
—Let’s get down from this rock, I said.
The bats of Dapitan, my brothers, followed us to the ground, swerving about and testing my shaky steps with their whirring, whistling wings. Their paniki moves.
Suddenly, I felt homesick, or what is it you call that humid swell of longing, like a wave in the chest, in my case activated by one creature’s passing caress—the whiff of sulfur in his flight, a frozen grist of tears caught in his graveyard wings. The changeling orbits of these creatures’ progress, night-scourers of grief, reminded me of the lush caverns of Cavite with its cold groves and banyan ghosts. And the haunting susurrus of their flight recalled another twilight moment—a long time ago.
I wondered at my distance from my hometown: up here by the foreign drawl of this southern sea. If I fell, no one would remember my name. If I drowned, no one would follow. An ancient undertow took me into its claws: a grip of sadness. How did I get here? On top of the rock, I was dizzy, disconcerted. And I imagined, from this vantage, I would never escape this island.
I understood then the weight, the burden in this place—the sour nightbloom of exile and remorse in Dapitan.
Slowly, distinctly, we left the bats to their derangement, and Rufino pulled me downward and downward, to meet smug Bulag, his feet firmly on the ground, who said:
—Aha! Did you feel it?
—What? Rufino said.
—The hand of the kapre, from the rock.
—No, said Rufino.
Yes, I thought, but I did not admit it out loud.
As we shuffled back toward the huts—we heard it clearly.
The hero’s voice.
We were standing to the right beyond their ken, under the shadow of the rock.
—And so the seed grows, the hero was saying.
—Still talking about his fruit, the paho, snorted Rufino.
—Sssh, whispered Bulag.
I hate to say it: there was something unconsoling about the voice, its echo of unspeakable remove. I knew I should leave, but I couldn’t. A pall oppressed me: a black despair. On Dapitan, if I were not careful, oblivion would swallow me up. Zamboanga was the end of the world, as far as anyone could tell from the top of that rock: and there was nothing, with all the pig-herding, coffee-planting, fishnet-hauling, butterfly-gathering, mango-eating, drainage-fathoming, eye-saving, Spanish-teaching, carpet-flying, even love-making—there was nothing to live for under its stricken, endless stars.
It was disorienting, the pearl of the orient: I could see no horizon against the beach. They had flung us far from the flat world, and anyway what was the point? To retrieve the illusion of wholeness for this random and sinking archipelago, this patchwork of bamboo-and-coconut planets speaking idly and in tongues? From where I stood, what was there to save—a geography as well stitched from the confused leaps of flying fish as from the solecisms of foreign lunatics? It was true. Into the dumb chattering world we had been born from the mad mistakes of Magellan and one day, who knows, we’ll perish from our own. My doubts blinded me even more than my senses did. Cosmologies built from spontaneous horror have the virtue of dubious detail, and for a minute I saw the precise outlines of my country’s fruitless map, etched in a plot of grass.
Arrested beside Dapitan’s sea, I grieved: it was undeniable.
In fact, I was surprised to see, as I looked about, the disjoint yet unmistakable shape of the archipelago in the distance, scraped out and shaped from a careful scrub of leaves.
What the hell—did the man plan out even the topiary of the nation?
From this vantage, the notion of Filipinas was at best a fluke, or worse someone else’s error.
—The resolutions of the association are just, patriotic, and timely, the hero murmured, especially as now Spain is weakened by the revolution in Cuba.
—So what are we to do?
The hero sighed, an escaped phantom from the chest.
I patched his sounds from the air, sonar gambles.
How distant for him were fights for the Cortes, newspapers’ propaganda fevers? Europe’s museums; straits of Gibraltar and Suez; maidens of Biarritz and lewd London; the scientific nightmare that was New York; and ships of Babel in which, to his misfortune, he alone understood words people used to slander one another. Childhood between the mountain and the bay, all the generic names of putative loves. They were mirages. He pondered daily which of the following most depressed him—to remember the sweet songs of his old yaya and her tobacco tales of mystical lakes, or to admit that those days would never return?
To what end revolt? He had said it already, better than most: he had balanced the syllogisms of further predations, proximal Japan or enormous America, take your pick.476 Worse—and personally he did not wish to live to see that day: to look at ourselves, in some abject distance, and so gaze: at the hopeless deformity of our hopes.
For the moment he made no answer, his silence drowned among bats.
—In Hong Kong, he said tentatively, I have a library—
But Don Pio interrupted that pleasant thought.
—The revolution . . . even . . . arms . . . there are over thirty thousand in the Katip . . .
—Precautions, the hero mumbled. Neutralize, he admonished. Horror, he declared.
Huh?
Their words were garbled and buried by the sounds of the sea, the riffling of monsoon foliage, the murmur of swallows and my endless bats; and my testimony has all the clarity of the tremulous sandfall of waves. Did it occur to me, with tingling blood and thumping heart, that, yes, I was eavesdropping on a pivotal moment, and the progress of our history would turn on the knife-point slices of these sentence fragments?
What a shiver of historical thrill should have frozen my deaf brain.
But I was terrified to be found out, knowing somehow I was in the wrong, and perhaps I gathered the ambiguities of our cause through my anxious filter, which explains my lasting sense of failure and unease. Maybe they did parse
