But at the café he looked simply the person he was, an addled professor: wizened, with glum fishy eyes. I understood that he still shuttled back and forth from the Jesuit dominions of his native south, and his long overdue book on Philippine fishes of the Sulu Sea had finally reached bacalao. Now the astronomical tower in Intramuros kept him busy, where he with a bunch of other mad amateur explorers scanned the heavens from an increasingly tenuous perch in the Spanish walled city, trying to gain perspective from the seat of power: a doomed project, in short, though some say their science was decent enough for men who believed in God.
The fact was, I felt guilty about not having looked him up at all in the years after school, after the book—but then my life had turned so different from my expectations. Instead of a scholar, I’d become a skunk. I stood before him a stinking paragon of slime: stealer, klepto, ravisher.
But I felt this déjà vu, a whip of recognition.
—Balangay, I said to the old man on a hunch.
—Marikit, he replied, without skipping a sip.
It did not surprise me when the waiter announced, fist pumped in the air: Malamig!
And then in chorus, raising their cups, a pair of polo laborers in workers’ fatigues, sang: Mabuhay! Viva!—GomBurZa! (Repeat 3x)504
They kicked up their feet in unison, scattering some coffee beans.
A slapdash portrait, more an impression than an image, rose curtain-like against the café’s walls. A somber man in European clothes, mustached, top-coated, in a three-piece suit, gazed down at me with an ethereal nod, already missing his kamuning cane.
He had that diagnostician’s look, the shrewd accusing upturn of his lips, and at that moment, I fell into a swoon.
I woke up to the faint smell of crème brûlée. Women were dancing about, their dresses merging to unfold a flag, panels in gold and gules with the hoist of a Spanish crest (crowned lion by gilt masonry) that dissolved into pirouettes of stars and stripes that blinded my watering eyes. Then in a trice, confounding my guilty eyes: a can-can flourish, and I raised my spectacles to see. The ladies posed in adorable plié to show peekaboo bloomers in piquant ruffles—and before I could grasp at them they blazoned: the scarlet ground of a secret flag, with the letters K in triplicate, argent against bloody field—one letter each on a showboat triplet’s showboat rump!
I will admit it was a rousing play, punctuated by gongs from gamelan, kulintang, and other exotic forms of random percussion, with Muslim geishas swishing gigantic abanikos, creating useless movement, as fans do, like roosters in abortive death-moves. A headhunter going out of his head lunged in staccato irrelevance and soon enough wild painted men in yodeling poses stretched out their arms to the unfurled flag, now gyrating amid a row of bumping behinds, while to the side women with bizarre candles on their heads displayed the perfection of their balance with enchanting nonchalance.
So much was going on in the pantomime display I was dizzy from the demands on my praise, and once again, I swooned.505
When I came to, all I could do was applaud, but the chorus drowned out my feeble noise.
Damn, damn, damn the insurrectos!
Cross-eyed khaki ladrones!
Underneath the starry flag,
Civilize them with a Krag,
And return us to our beloved home!506 507 508 509
A bit of a panic ensued on stage, as it occurred to the singers that they had the lyrics to the wrong song. A flurry of scripts and operatic gestures, accusing fingers pointing at the bewildered strings, the rondalla (infantile rotund bandurria, and passive octavina, and guitar gazing at its navel in indifference, while bass attempted, in vain, to blend in without calling attention to itself). The rondalla struck a note of anguish, rapidly squashed under its own steam. The chorus resumed:
Damn, damn, damn the cazadores,
They say they come to crush the lawless
But no crime-fighters, they—
Really, they’re chicken stealers and cow-rustlers, hey! (Repeat 2x)
Refrain:
Call them cazadores—that’s a lie:
Saviors and law-enforcers, my eye!
Sock it to me, sacadores—
You’re just a bunch of extortionists and whores!510 511
Hey, sacadores—give us back our cantaloupes,
Tomatoes and watermelons! Cazadores: you leave us
With nothing—not even a shred
Of dignity.512 513
And then, in the midst of this ebullient potage came a voice: I tried to gather the source of grace—where amid the pageant’s scuttling shadows did the brief note arise? I could not, the instant I heard it, trace its pure trajectory, and perhaps for that reason it seemed to emerge from the awful tremor of my own bones. The voice was sweet, pained. It spoke dirge and demand. It ordered my confusion. It was as if, in the moment of its expression, an aimless hope came into shape.
You’ve heard the words before: you’ve sung the song. It asks a simple question: Aling pag-ibig?514 515 You have no reply, not because the question proposes your answer. It is precisely the speaking of it that creates grief: the need to speak is the sorrow. These were not, of course, reflections I pondered while the voice rang, ending in a kind of sepulchral echo in my heart’s chamber.
I was a runaway printer, after all, carrying a straw mat stuffed with stolen papers. I had no right to be moved. And yet I stood before Father Gaspar on that morning with a burst of love. Abstract, unfamiliar. It was, to be honest, an intolerable thing; I was a fatling in patriotic lard, a rice cake simmering in the saturated oils of a congested heart. It was a not so healthy state and yet the only one in which, at the moment, I could exist.
—Hijo, repeated Father Gaspar. What brings you here?
He
