The drunk old bandit Matandang Leon, he of the flaming carbuncle and the fearless march, insisted that he knew my father.
I should have trusted this strange man’s confession, a monumental revelation fit for its own paragraph and best enclosed in a glass case.
But I hate to say—Matandang Leon did not have a look of probity. I mean, he was a bandit. True, he dominated the old lady’s yard519 with his muscular bulk—a well-hewn man of above average endowment. God, I wondered what it was like to be him—how many women could he have on his good nights? But this was not one of those good nights. His eyes were bloodshot, and his notorious carbunco, sure to be written up in song, if the fates have any sense, glowed like a red glistening jewel on his forehead and blinked at me like his third evil eye. Veins and dried pus festered at his wound as if the carbuncle were some geological mass, a dormant volcano, and his veins were the prehistoric clusters that witnessed its age. The unwashed wildgrass hair, the betel breath, the way he tore into the horse’s hoof like a tikbalang, a repulsive cannibalistic sight—I know these details are irrelevant, but they grossed me out.
Matandang Leon turned out to be one of those susceptible alcoholics—one drink and he was gone, as if drunkenness came from auto-suggestion, like a curse from a manggagaway.
When as a boy I longed to know of my father, I imagined the news reaching me as a bugle call from noble messengers, telling me the principe of Asturias had knighted him for his deeds. Not really, but still, I wished for a better news service, not this drunk with a bukol.
Why the Supremo chose Matandang Leon to lead us was a mystery, though I bowed to his intelligence, of course. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to see him again, the Supremo, and to show him my stash. No matter the shame. But he was kind of busy, what with starting the revolution and all—I could not get a word in with him. Even now I wonder, after all these years, what the hell he was thinking when he went off to Cavite in November and left these men from Manila—who loved him, loved him, loved him so?520 I stood apart from them, that’s true, carrying my ragged straw bundle, a bit like those pictures of the disciples’ last dinner, with the irrelevant, hungry dog in the foreground, and divinity recessed.
But that night in August we crowded round him like locusts, or bees driven to their maker, dancing in their hive.
Yes, I would never have found him, the Supremo—where am I?—for whom do I write?—to what does my mind regress?—if not for that lechera, rare and radiant, whom the angels. Some would say Leonor the milkmaid wasn’t much to look at, that morning I found her in a ditch, after the meeting with Father Gaspar, before I heard the clarion of Matandang Leon. No, not much to look at, I will admit—plus she had a nasty temper, worse than a wife’s.
It’s true, our first coupling was not worthy of a man, and even less of a woman, given that, technically, I would call it, without her urging, rape. I followed her, and she let me, but even so I am a craven ghoul. Even now I am not sorry, though even then I knew I was no good. The hounds of war at my heels, the roar of semen—ah, it’s all semantics, technically, a pretty drooling of words that disguises that raw burst of freaking manhood as other than what it was, my brute failure at being a man.
I followed her that morning because—because—I preferred to get lost. I confess. I didn’t think so then, because I was busy spilling it, but it makes more sense to spend seed than blood. I’m not much of the hero type. I mean, I’m fucking blind. Being with Leonor, with her leper body and her milky wounds, was by far, if you think about it with any kind of rational thought, an infinitely better alternative to killing other people. Really. I’d rather fuck a leper than go to war. That’s just common sense. I know, I know—the Spaniards were our enemies. But I’m just not a killer. I’m not even much of a rapist, as critical Leonor later smirked.
Really, I’m just a reader.
To be honest, I do not know if I would have gotten anywhere in this story if Leonor had not, in the end, kicked me out of her house.
Let me say, once more. With injustice I call her, lime of my life, slip of my tongue, light of my dungeon, a leper, when it is I who should hold this awful sign—do not touch.
I’m a wordy, worthless beast.
There is only one whose happiness I think of in these dying hours—in this dim bat cave of a jail, this prison of our last solitude—let me not kid myself, these days don’t look good, what with my friend Benigno laid out like a cross on a watered floor, somewhere in this maze of torture chambers that we share, here in the American hell.
My powers are waning but my memory engorges in terrible moments, especially when I smell my blood, crunch of salt on my chin in this churlish cell: and my spleen does not feel so good either. Oh, Americans of easy fame, we of easy faith: and here I am of uneasy fortune, waterlogged, mangled, and so they say losing my sight if not my mind: oddly enough, I see more clearly now than I ever have before, remembering Leonor.
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