It’s my own rebellion.
I like to imagine she sits somewhere in the sunlight out there, in Pangasinan or Panay, mixing tahô or selling planggana, hawking all kinds of harmless mixed-use wares out by Balintawak. I wish her among a brood of children and a good man by her side, preferably clear-eyed.
Leonor, here’s looking at you, if I might be allowed to use that verb: I hope providence, though blind, treats you well.
It was not I who told her my secret: the blasted woman goddamned stole it from me.
She’d gone through my belongings as I lay asleep, and as if in a dream, she thrust the papers at me like a sword.
—Sonomagun! Ispichoso! You’re one of them—you’re carrying secret papers and rebel documents! Plibestiro!
—Filibustero, I corrected her.
Of all people, it is the lecheras and the buyeras and the putas, and it wasn’t clear to me if Leonor was one or all of the above, who know of the comings and goings of furtive men, who understood clues of suspicion like goddamned sybils.
Leonor and her companions must have understood the inevitable outbreak of war months before we all recognized it ourselves. The secrets of the sleeping city are laid bare to those who trek through the labyrinths before we awake and after we lie in bed. And even now I am not sure if Leonor was one of the above some of the time or all of the above most of the time—I only know she had a walk and a look that marked her as a marvelous, ambiguous wreck.
In any case she had an understanding finer than that of a spy, who’s a mere pawn in the business, after all, while she is a powerful invisible eye: she’s a woman.
At first, when she discovered the manuscript, she would have nothing to do with me.
—Tell me what these are? she screamed.
—They are the hero’s pages, I said in a panic as she beat me up in her sad hovel.
—How dare you—endanger—my poor mother!
I didn’t even know she had one, and worse that she had all along been that limp hump in the corner of the room, never stirring, like a sack of copra, while we did the nasty thing!
—My ma does not need more pain!
But she’s barely alive, I thought, my God, she’s as animate as a bandehado, sleeping through your racket! How much suffering can a corpse take?
—Please don’t twist the papers, Leonor, please. That’s the hero’s novel.
—What hero, you worm, you thug, you pimp?
—The hero. Doctor Jose Rizal.
—Oh. My. God.
I thought she would pummel me right then when I said his name, maybe even drag her sleeping rag of a mother into the fray, to beat me up with the lump of her ma.
—Don’tyouknowtowritehisnamedownisacrimeandtospeakitisacurse? Toownhisbooksisstupidandtoreadthemisworse?
And so on and so forth in a burst of mellifluous malediction, and I could have mentally corrected her unforeseen prejudice or at least praised her rhyming run-ons if I had not been in such a bind.
Leonor held the sheaf of papers hostage in her mad hands.
I did not keep my eyes off them for a minute as she wailed and flailed.
I waited for the moment to snatch them, but it was a delicate issue, as I had to do it without harm to my quarry. I tried not to move as she cried, so as not to provoke the wrong gesture. My God that lady had a temper and a tongue. She was quite magnificent, if you discount her missing teeth and garlic breath, plus the way the buyô had coated with a reddening rust the rest of her dental squalor.
But you know, even her sores to me had an odd luminescence as I watched her fury, as if each scab and pockmark had some glory, and all I had to do was connect the scary dots and find my way home, or at least trace somehow, even if only by phonemic dabbling, her crooked symmetry into stars.
Then she calmed down and asked:
—So what are we going to do?
It did not occur to me then that the sweetness of the word—the word “we”—would be my undoing. The life of tenderness is best left to non-combatants, husbands and cowards and other lucky bastards who prefer to survive. It was not my life, as I had a commission from Father Gaspar, to wit, quote unquote, nothing exists without an observer, and anyway I had sworn an oath to the Sons of the People, with a little slit of a scar on my biceps to show for it, which I revealed to her later, and she kissed it awkwardly so that I felt her stubbly chin on my armpit—a curiously domestic affair.
She held the papers still in her lap, and I finally took them from her.
She watched me smooth out the sacred corners and pat down the wrinkles.
She had scarred some words, and her spit had damped out some inkblots. What words of the hero had been erased by her madwoman’s saliva, lachrymous lacunae to be deciphered by dumb scholars in our dim future? It was all my fault. I put the sheaves back in the creased square of the straw mat and again she asked:
—So what are we going to do?
If I had known Leonor then as I know her now I would have understood that to a woman of action questions are rhetorical and a plan was already in place.
She told me she had witnessed in her wanderings the escape of the katipuneros from their homes in the dead of morning, she had witnessed arrests and horrors. One man was torched in his hovel. Another was blinded by the Filipino guardia’s lash: whipped by his own neighbor. I won’t repeat the stories here, as even in the retelling the tales slit me up, find fresh places in my cut-up flesh, gained from the pity of Leonor. Most of all, Leonor
