Degenerative macular morbidity, in a lingering dry stage, with incipient retinitis pigmentosa: hence, nyctalopia will only exacerbate. I mean, he said gently, resting a fleeting finger on my eye as if it could heal its phantom hurt, your nightblindness. It will only get worse. Straight lines may appear wavy and objects may appear in the wrong shape or size. In your old age you will experience the loss of correct colors, and while you will note the disappearance of objects in the eye’s central frame, who knows, peripheral vision might remain.
You have a dark, empty area in the center of your vision, the hero explained.
My heart understood his diagnosis, and my soul, as if in pathetic agreement, clenched in shame. Unfortunately, his tone told me, there was no cure. It was all too true, and I felt he knew that the weakness was not just in my eyes for he looked at me with an insuperable tenderness that I have yet to be able to portray sufficiently, much less construe—as if he had glimpsed something else bereft in me. For a minute, I felt the comfortless gift of imagining significance in my degeneration. It helped me to think of my symptoms as a portent rather than a waste. The moment passed. And then—and I remember it distinctly—I had this odd satisfying feeling of knowing with certainty that nothing will be of help. Truth, I guess, is always a relief.486 My fate was beyond my grasp, an organic fruition that even the hero could not cure. Who was I to whimper, curse the gods or the gluttons of tragedy that follow us, poor mortal creatures in the clutch always of some sort of fall? Even he would not escape, though I could not see, blind as I was, the extent of the pain his own agony would cause.
Not that I use such an easy alibi, the trauma of diagnostic despair, as reason for my subsequent actions. My lightness of mind, I will admit, did not leave me when I left the clinic and joined the populace of polyps out in Dapitan’s sun. It was as if, now that my misfortune was settled, I was free to commit errands of distraction, missions of obscure mayhem in who knows which and whose direction? I felt the liberty of a leper and the fulsome feelings of a bandit recently released from jail.
I met again the blind Moro, first in line in her wondrous gown, and resisted the urge to embrace and swaddle her ample body with my affection—which was a good thing, as you know such fine thoughts could promote aggressive responses in unsuspecting persons. And hers is a suspicious tribe as we who’ve never lived with them ascribe. A crippled pair playing checkers, a tall boy praying with webbed fingers, and a palsied chorus of abridged disasters: plus a slew of blind mice. I passed them with the mute portions of my pity, distributing through my glances my useless form of love.
—What! Stop staring at me, coño! Haven’t you seen a man without balls before?
Before the atesticular indecent Spaniard could kill me, I raced down the path beyond the sand.
Thus I wandered Talisay in a mania of inert passion, ready to give away my heart if anyone so pleased. Sure enough, I passed by Bulag, and my double’s sanguine look of disrepair was enough to make my tears overflow, and I tried to pass off the sentimental moment by pretending I had kaingin ash in my eye. He said, as if he had not ignored me in the last hallucinatory hour: how’d you do, and all that, before hurrying on to the clinic—I realized he was also the medical orderly, bringer of ointments and hygiene commander—and good luck to us.
Adios ta, he called out to me, running: he was late for his job.
I passed the buyera with her weapons of forgetting, both the betel nuts and their slimy lime, and if only I had the money I would have bought a pound of her beat-up poison. She offered me good day but no credit in the cheerful generosity that marked Dapitan’s folk, and I choked a grateful greeting in reply. Up past the beach I walked, straying so far I could now barely snatch the sight of sand from my screen of fruit-fallen trees. Everything was so lush out here in the promised land the mangoes lay rotting. Ditto the lanzones. Like the flies, I filled my lungs with their decadent perfume. I washed my body in a random stream, and I checked out my face in its pure mirror.
I was surprisingly unchanged, given the significance of the moment. I was exactly as I had been—reddish and wrinkled under my straw hat, with a small hill of a nose like my uncle’s and my grandfather’s crazy, wide-open eyes. Nothing special, except for my extravagant, admittedly bulbous brow, like my father’s, which made my head look precarious, like his. In truth, I was nondescript and looked like any old mixed-up Filipino circa 1896, fresh from a bout of self-discovery and therefore bitter about fortune.
He had given me a receipt, an RX of rueful pablum in his tidy script. All through my walk, I clutched it in my hand, like an amulet. Potassium iodide: 3 grams. Distilled water: 100 grams. To be taken one spoonful each morning. Signed. Now I looked at his signature. Finally, I had his autograph. For some reason I began sobbing like a baby, the way I had never sobbed before, the way I never would again. I felt my body rush out of me, and it sneezed out my soul. I wheezed and burped, and in my sorrow I exhaled the offal of rank fruit. The sounds and fruit pulp, the dregs of paho, that came out of me were
