—No, I said.
—Really? Feel my chin: I have the beard of a goat.
—No, I said.
—You mean he did not turn me into an animal for our sins? God bless the kapre! He took mercy on our souls!
In the fresh light of Dapitan’s sulky morning, I laughed.
—Tu un tonto, I said, meaning both of us, eavesdropping citizens, and in my bewilderment I spoke Rufino’s crazy tongue.
460 The hero refers to the giant of Philippine legend (see also Entry #15) whose imprisoned length informs the caves of San Mateo. How interesting to witness here the hero making an allusion to his own novel, El Filibusterismo, which famously resurrects the old legend, and so mirroring the image here at least quadruply. Gives me a migraine. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
461 Aha! “Ojo. Mata. Ojo.” Cf. Raymundo Mata’s bulagtasan in Entry #2. Mata (Tagalog) = Ojo (Spanish) = Eye. I get that! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
462 Valenzuela’s biographer states: “While they were exchanging pleasantries, a messenger came from the military governor, Ricardo Carnicero.” Carnicero was recalled in 1893, replaced by Juan Sitges, a doctor, and later by “the linguist Morales” [Leon Maria Guerrero, The First Filipino], then he was briefly restored in 1896. Rizal had amiable relations with each of these captors. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
463 From hijo de coño (son of a bitch; coño literally means that shy swatch of the female body, best left unsaid), a favored form of address among the vulgar, i.e., Spaniards. In colloquial Filipino, the term means any one of the wealthy Spanish-speaking or Spanish-looking classes, that is, Filipinos of a certain decadent group, i.e., katsila. What do you think, Dr. Diwata, is this a form of historical justice or not—how language metes out unconscious revenge, a transformed truth, as you would say? Dr. Diwata? Filipinos blithely baptize the españolado upper classes with the curse the old Spanish classes bestowed liberally, for centuries, upon others, not to mention each other—our just revenge—what would your Doctor Murky Smirk think? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
464 Dear Estrella, forgive me, I am still re-reading. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Antibes, France)
465 Charlatan, from the Spanish charlar. Que charlatán: that is, what a talktative show-off! I can only guess that’s the original, since no one is making charlar with me. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
466 Caesar salad?! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
467 According to the third edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary, this salad was named “in honor of (Gaius) Julius Caesar by Giacomo Junia, Italian-American chef in Chicago, who invented it c. 1903.” However, the exact origins of caesar salad may predate 1903, somewhere in Giacomo Junia’s Italy, where Rizal traveled in 1895, after a stint in Germany where in turn he may have fathered Hitler’s great-uncle, and definitely before he arrived in London, where he may have been Jack the Ripper. Rizal invented this delightful dish of goat cheese sprinkled on lechugas, with a dash of toasted bread crumbs, creating it quite on the fly even as his fingers tangled about his other invention, developed out of his crafty boredom, a spinning wooden globe upon a string, later called yoyo, apparently an ancient Chabacano verb referring to metatarsal actions yet to be fully revealed. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
468 What the hell, what kind of wikimess is that? (Trans. Note)
469 Finally, Mimi C. Gotcha! I knew food, plus expletive, would make you reappear. You know, it was getting quite lonely, though I was doing fine on my own, if I say so myself. But yes, maybe it was not Rizal who was Jack the Ripper—maybe it was Juan Luna. He fled Paris for London after he killed his wife. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
470 Was it Rizal who baptized his houseboy/medical aide on Dapitan “Bulag,” the Tagalog term for blind man? The word for blind, on Dapitan, is the Visayan “Buta” or “Halap.” Later, the houseboy Bulag became a prominent teller of Rizal tales, a separate genre in itself in Dapitan. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
471 Dear Mimi C., do you think that evidence here suggests the hero-linguist did learn Zamboanga Chabacano, a “pidgin” mix of Spanish and Visayan languages? His letters to the Caviteño patriot Evaristo Aguirre show the hero bantering in Cavite Chabacano as well. See also Chapter 28, “Tatakut,” in El Filibusterismo, a sparkling gem in the book’s linguistic stew—language being that novel’s theme. Chalk Chabacano then to a list of at least ten languages [5 European, 4 Filipino, and 1 dead] spoken by the hero. Plus, he used to pretend-speak Japanese to gullible Frenchmen at museums in Paris. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
472 Psst, Don Mundo—your compatriots are all here! Again, nineteenth-century Chabacano, with variable orthography, occurs in the text. I imagine that the translator left the original in for a reason, and not because she was asleep at the wheel. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
473 In Don Pio’s version, the only other text of this event, Raymundo and Rufino are not even minor characters. They’re stick figures who are told: stay—do not go near us when we talk! It is to Raymundo’s credit that he refuses and so achieves his place in time, and this trio’s walk toward the beach is a sublime moment, as three blind men catch up with history. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
474 Here’s an expletive, Mimi C.: do you want to break your vow of silence? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
475 In the round robin of offensive play that marks linguistic legacy, cafre is a Spanish term that, unsurprisingly, has roots in a derogatory word for blacks (kaffir). However, in Arabic kafir means infidel. In sum, for Filipinos, kapre is a magical beast—that is, the magical beast that is language. (Trans. Note)
476 In his 1889 essay Filipinas dentro de cien años, Rizal eliminated a host of other plausible colonists that could come after Spain (among them Holland, Germany, Japan, or China) and at the end of this list deemed America the probable candidate: “it is not impossible [for America to think of expanding in Asia], for example is contagious, greed and ambition
