492 Aha! Just as I thought. English keeps creeping into the memoir. Excuse me once again if I disappear from these pages for a while until I finish re-reading with a fine-toothed comb, a magnifying eye, all the Entries presented so far. PS: If you send me an email, please do not be offended by my automatic out-of-office reply: I’m re-reading. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
Entry #37493
493 A series of entries in what seems like katakana, or Sanskrit, or who knows a wandering ancient Gaelic appeared crumpled up in the bin in which the Mata manuscript was rotting. Fortunately, I kept intact every piece of garbage in the tin, including cobwebs, two dead spiders, and a number of rusting Coke tanzans, circa the American postwar period. After lengthy study, sleeplessness, rationalization, I deciphered the mystery, inserted in this section of Part IV, The General in the Revolution, which otherwise contains mainly a number of finely handwritten pieces of a meandering sort, undated, though any student of history can tell the sequence of time.
The long-crumpled, newly deciphered message appears above. Oddly enough, Estrella, the writer named these aborted sections plots. (Trans. Note)
Plot I: Two Pesos
The plot of Polonio took everyone by surprise though everybody knew about it. How could you not, when Polonio and his men all had the same bloody wound on their biceps and kept speaking in hand signals, like deafmutes, though none of them were deaf? That group of printers moved about for all intents and purposes like a tight-knit barkada, but in their case with dim Morse code tics.
No one would have minded their exclusive ways if they were a bit less—well, let’s say, sensitive. They were a thin-skinned bunch who brooded over their afflictions so that each bruise was always raw, worse than Prometheus’s liver. From my point of view, they celebrated their brotherhood with rancor that was a bit too vigorous. They would have nothing to do with me even after seeing me at that boat meeting in Antipolo.
They kept apart because I was friends with “Leandro,” the boss’s stooge, but what could I do? He was a pro-Spanish creep with a dozen children to feed, and he had given me the job. Sure, he had favorites, such as that weasel Patiño, he with the slick brilliantine hair and airs of an ilustrado (his sister was cute, though). In any case, I always knew I would never be their friend, because they were from Manila and I was from Cavite, which did not bisect it seems with any point on their triangles. Or maybe, as I began to consider it, it was I who was weird.
When I returned from Dapitan, I could breathe nothing of my adventure to any soul, to no rebel nor relative—no nothing, not even to a puta of Paco Dilao—Don Pio made me swear. There was no need to twist my arm. I had my own cross to bear. I did not dare to confide even in Rufino—and anyway, he went back home to Kawit, where I understand he’s retailing a pack of tales about magicians, coming up with one fable after another for a few sticks of La Insular cigarettes.
Mostly, I kept to myself, more so now than before, though none of us at the Diario had ever been friendly. There’s something about being a member of a secret society that makes you, well, secretive, surly, and morose. Or maybe morose men seek the comfort of cloaks and daggers. It’s true that once Polonio, in a rare burst of curiosity, asked about “the visit.” I showed him my druggist’s receipt for potassium iodide. It was the medicine, I said proudly, that the writer-ophthalmologist had ordered. He was impressed. I, on the other hand, knew the vanity of my placebo, and I went home depressed.
I wonder what I looked like to men in those days. Did my bleary eyes give me away—I was sneaking off during siesta and returning with my disbelief under constant suspense. I was a nervous wreck, and I had the habits and heightened introspection to prove it.
I avoided my colleagues.
I was reading.
I kept trying to read the disheveled pages with the scarce daylight that I had, and it was enough to make anyone irritable. In addition, I was terrified of getting caught. At work I was clumsy and forgetful, and every time I misprinted a page or blotted some ink, I knew any kind of promotion was beyond my grasp.
The fuss over the appointment of a new foreman meant nothing to me, therefore—I could care less who was going to get ahead of whom, and how many measly centavos it meant to his daily bread. I was reading my stash in bits and pieces, and it was driving me nuts! I was in a state of arousal like one of those louts touching wild women in the market without proper reward. Those first days back at the Diario, I was spent in the passion of my labors with the secret novel and to be honest forgot the point of my existence.
I only grasped vaguely that something was up when one of Polonio’s brothers (and mine, too, for I kept forgetting, in that wasteful time, that I, too, was a Son of the People) took me aside and asked me which man I chose.
—For what, I asked, confused.
—To be foreman, tanga! To get the raise from eighteen to twenty pesos a month.
—You mean, for two pesos more?
—Yes. Who do you pick? The katsila boss’s man, that show-off Patiño, or Polonio, your brother who is more worthy?
—My brother, of course, I said.
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I thought fighting over two pesos was dumb, no matter how much lambanog it would get, plus, our boss was French, not katsila, but I didn’t bother elaborating.
However, I had given the right answer, and he allowed
