In my blindness, I almost, almost stumbled over it as I fled.
And now I return with lost foreboding to that moment back on the ship—when finally after my sawdust breakfast and faithless goodbye, the formal exchange of pleasantries and jars of preserved paho (plus secret gifts) between the two doctors, and our forlorn launch from that betrayed beach, we all climbed aboard our returned-to-sender ship, gaggle of revolutionaries carrying the weight of their finished business and already missing the mystic peace of the vanishing isle—I finally escaped their accusing eyes.
True, no one noticed my agitation nor the lumbering stiffness of my movements: each of the doctors was wrapped in his separate dilemma. Come to think of it, even in the best of moments, no one would have noticed me. Even Rufino brooded in his own manner, following Don Procopio and his new twirling cane.
I hid down in the hold where the cows bore me no grudges: and there, I threw my project on the straw. A pillow of magic. The sheaves jumped from my tainted hands. I gazed at my catch, my pilfered fish—these were my grace, my curse, and my bounty. I’ll show them all, I had said, all those mestizos and priests and ladies—all the astounded host. I’ll show Lady K (but I will avoid the gaze of the other’s weeping gray eyes). What did I have to show? My shadow sheltered those orphaned sheaves, now lifeless on the straw. I gathered them all again, in a bundle: burrowed in my petate. For those five days, they breathed under the cows, explosive as kindling.
Up on the passenger deck, as I said, Don Pio walked about with his new, fine kamuning cane. It was the hero’s gift, exchanged for Don Pio’s pistol. Good riddance. With awe, Rufino looked out for the mago’s cane during the entire trip, as if the stick were God’s subaltern.
He did not dare touch it.
Back on the shore of Manila Bay, when we got off the banca and quarreled again with the criminal pilot, who wanted more than his share of the passage as usual, being a Batangueño, all Don Pio needed to do was rap on the boat’s side with that kamuning cane—its garish mouths swearing their silent oaths—and, swear to God, the pilot was struck dumb.
So Rufino Mago tells the story.
Don’t you know, Rufino crowed to the nonplused Don Pio, that cane is encantado ya—that cane is magic!
The pilot took our small change, and without protest, without a word, he left Don Pio to his not-so-scientific stupefaction.
But I was preoccupied, I did not notice. I understood something had turned on that intolerable portage—as we sailed back through Cebu, Capiz, and Romblon—this time devoid of the flatteries of ladies, even of the smiling Segunda of our old Venus, who had abandoned ship around Jolo, we learned, but not without leaving (her form of affection) an entire crate of castrated feathers to her faithful castrated cook. For some reason on that journey the wind, a ceaseless unseasonal storming, burdened our days with a sense of failure, though our mission, or so claimed Don Pio, hoping against hope amid the din, was not really entirely lost. Or maybe it’s true that even in such details as harsh weather my conscience betrays me into imagining a damned deluge.
And yet—lash myself as I will, whip and batter that imp, my soul—still, I felt at the same time, yes, an odd terrible lightness. Even as I withered on that benighted ship: I carried in secret, against my bosom, that fledgling being: a novel. It scratched against my chest. It crackled as if alive. It breathed with me. That portage was intolerable—the way the absurd tempest of being is intolerable, the way the emergent hatchling of words, the slow reading of a story, is at times impossible to bear, and it’s best to put it down. But I didn’t. Across the country on that boat, I carried upon me, I guess, a pack of words: my own troubling war.
Part Four
The General in the Revolution
In which the hero chooses between Polonio and Patiño—Contemplates virtues of pakwan—Receives a message from “Leandro”—Escapes from Binondo—Comes upon ichthyological Father Gaspar—Witnesses a zarzuela—Meets a milkmaid—Arrives in Balintawak—Receives news from the bandit Matandang Leon—Fights in the “Battle of Balara”488
488 More accurately, Raymundo fought in the Battle of Pasong Tamo, several leagues away. His kleptobibliomania insisted on Balara because it is alliterative. Bastard! Klepto! (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium)
Entry #36
Like a novel revolution is never finished489 490 491 492
489 The above is the statement as it appears in the original, in English, unpunctuated. Some interpretations, provisional, awaiting final edit, are the following:
subject-puzzle, fill in the blank: Like a novel revolution, [ ] is never finished. Trans. Q: Find the missing referent of the modifier “novel revolution”? But why?
convention, use splice: Like a novel, revolution is never finished. A comma should pierce the first two nouns, to correct the awkward notion, “novel revolution,” which anyhow, without one more noun, renders the line ungrammatical. Trans. Q: Is the speaker speaking as i) a novelist, ii) a reader of a novel, iii) a revolutionary, iv) none of the above, v) all of the above, vi) etc.?
colloquial, annoying: Like, a novel revolution is never finished. Trans. Exclamation: Basta! (Trans. Note)
490 Nonsense. There is only one logical sentence. Like a novel, revolution is never finished. Period. How brazen! What gall! The blind criminal refers without shame to the novel he has just kidnapped: Bastard! Klepto! (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
491 And yet, come to think of it, is it true—like a novel, revolution is never finished? Maybe that explains why they call them plots? In short, the scourge of
