When it came to the crunch, I knew it. I was just some latinidad lechugas, a vegetable lump.477 478 479
—So do I, he said.
—I mean, sir—Iwonderhowyouhavethetimetowrite, with everything you do in Talisay?
I blurted it all out in a phantasmic burp.
He wasn’t angry. He kept sauntering down the path.
—I mean, sir, you do entomology, ophthalmology, pedagogy, in fact all kinds of ology—
I chased him down the path.
—Don’t forget pathology, he said without turning to look at me. However, I rarely do apology, he added, moving on.
I hurried to keep up.
—But where do you get the time to write the third instalment? The whole island speaks evidence of your mythic energy: cartography, sculpture, engineering, husbandry, everything but—
—Don’t forget wizardry, he said, waving his cane.
—All sorts of wizardry! I said. Hypnotism, mesmerism, telekineticism.
—Don’t forget witticism, he exclaimed.
—You have a host of worlds to suit all types of fancy, but come stai le livre?480 481
Briefly, descending, he looked back, as if the sun were in his eyes, though he faced west: he glared straight at me, and I understood what Bulag had said.
His gaze could turn you into stone.
He laughed.
It was not what I expected, but it was the only reply I got.
—Come, Mr. Mata, he said. It’s time for your check-up.
We were at the clinic, and I woke up.
The eye has a vitreous humor, mysteriously impervious to the touch, enclosed in sclera and choroid bands. If you cut it, it resists like rubber. If you hold it, it exhales. More fabulous than a mirror, it is less fragile. If you scratch it, it gains the wisdom of renewal. But the eye’s atrophy, like any other affliction, admits to no reverses under certain states. I have long understood that my situation was that of a damaged soul, an original infection passed on from a cursed breed. That man of mystery and hack from Jaca, my mad grandfather, had been no pristine specimen even in his prime, though he had the miraculous gall to keep on living, immortal in his peevishness. His dimness was tiresomely physical, not just symbolical, though I was prone in my young wrath to find in his blind gestures the proof of colonial disaster. Even my father, el genio Jote, was famous for his lack of vision: he declaimed rather than read and dramatized rather than observed. Who knows what failings gripped him even now in his jungle wanderings, if he so lives, out there with my mystical bats? I could tell, from the doctor’s sighs in his cool clinic, as I lay under the balm of his camphor, or was it chloroform, that all was not well, and soon he would divine my bleak future.
Of my genetic history, I believe I gave him the above scant clues, and though I hope I did not in my delirium give away undue bitterness, I secretly wished him to pity me.
In short, I have no idea what I revealed. I surrendered to the hypnosis of his cold, Teutonic hands. He wrote in a notebook—I heard him scribbling as if from a drugged distance—and he clipped and prodded me with icy screws, while I lay back in the rustic medical chair, with its hemp bottom and leather scars, and gave up the ghost to the intermittent swivel of its squeaking wood. I believe it was to that unhinged sound that I owed my surrender—or some other creaky pendulum of forgetting. Outside the waft of burning lanzones peels soon fumigated the medical hut. And perhaps it was, as I now imagine, the sway of the snake and the soothing swish of its apocalyptic tongue that unlocked my own speech. In any case, in my version, I proceeded to spill the history of my country as I have done until now482 483 484 485 amid the distinct smoke musk of mosquito repellent in Dapitan.
I may as well lay it out here in its complete abjection—the last, minute details of my fraudulent adventure with the Doctor, who did the only thing he could do for us when we asked him about revolution: the next morning, he examined my disease. You might wonder that he still deigned to see me, the decoy patient, despite the discovery of our arrival on his island under flagrant false pretences. My heart still races, with deep, irretrievable shame, when I remember with what good nature he rewarded our bad faith. By the morning, I was so completely sorry for our obvious inconvenience and ignorant trespass on his retiro, that I preferred to run away on the next boat or flying carpet, whichever arrived first at Dapitan.
Instead, I found myself in the confines of his leafy clinic, the first among a host of cystic polyps, fistulae, vesical calculi, osteomyelites, tongue carcinomas: the mass of patient patients now awake and nurturing their fragrant buyô in the lines beyond his langka trees.
In the clinical act, I believe, he was most at ease.
Tinkering with his implements, he calibrated pulse and heartbeat, then in his impersonal way he asked me personal questions, and for no good reason I forgot the rest, as if I’d fallen into a dream. His bedside manner was sublime, to the point of amnesia. Don’t blame me for my inattention, the sciences of the nineteenth century are not my cup of tea. I preferred, of course, full wakefulness, in which I could take down notes, but so much of that fateful morning has the air of shameful smog (a regrettable hypnosis first contrived, I understand, in French and Germanic institutions)—except for sensory perceptions of the wasteful kind, such as the annoying invisible bedbugs in the medical chair, the bloody death-throes of poisoned mosquitoes, and various kinds of glass vessels with vile and fascinating smells—that I labor to write them all down though I do not believe any of my foolish details will be of use.
I don’t even know if I spent five minutes or five hours with him, so variable
