She had an ear to the ground for the whispers of the hawkers, and later she left me alone with her oblivious ma, who scared me to death in the middle of the afternoon when she suddenly sat up, and then all she did was roll cigarettes all day and smoke in peace.
When Leonor returned, it was she who told me where to go: toward the fields of Caloocan.
Father Gaspar had a key. It was Leonor who had a clue.
No war could happen without women.
Father Gaspar only had the script.
She kicked me out to get me on the road.
But bless me, Father, for I have sinned:
I did not want to leave.
I was seeking the Supremo because I believed he was the only man I could trust. I explained everything that day to Leonor, as if I were talking to my own self, because she had an odd way of taking on the expressions of the story, as if her face were a narrative mirror, and to be honest if Leonor had ever learned to read, she would have been a damned magician521 at it.
I told Leonor, only the Supremo will understand—like me, he loves the writer, not the hero.
Hadn’t I seen him defend the book, to the shawled cripple in Ermita?
I am sorry, but I must challenge you to a duel for your thoughts.
Leonor’s shy look of admiration for the Supremo’s polite boldness won my own silent praise.
I told her, the Supremo will tell me what to do.
She nodded with the anxiety I felt, the underlying question—but what would the Supremo say to my crime?
How would anyone respond?
Leonor’s face fell as it would in that ghost minute before the expectation of another reader’s horror.
Well, think about it, I said to her, the Supremo had read all of the Filibusterismo. Curse my life that I have yet to read that second novel, and what am I doing, wandering around with the thir—
And Leonor went into a reverie, that lingering mood that shadows base acts for which one fails to summon up regret.
And as a last confession I told Leonor, almost as an aside, as if it were the least of my worries, I still don’t know what came over me, why I walked into the hero’s hut, that kiosk on the rib of that cursed hill, with the garland of flowers outside it, a corona of color around a grass mound—and my disheveled mind still puzzles over one thing.
The witness of the weeping woman’s gray eyes, the melancholy lady who watched me take his book.
Leonor’s meditative pity as she dwelt upon the weeping woman gave me hope that she, finally, might fill the reader’s gap.
Leonor spoke.
—She wasn’t looking, Leonor concluded with the superior wisdom of women.
She was looking at her grief: not you.
And it struck me then that it was true.
The slight damp mound bordered by flowers in the lanzones hill in the exile paradise of Talisay—it was the width and measure of a child. An infant’s wildflower tomb. The hut was the burial grave: there where he had abandoned his aborted novel, her still child lay.522
517 Various commentators have already noted this error: Pasong Tamo is more likely the first battle, when the soldiers of drunken Matandang Leon were surprised by the veterana soldiers near Tandang Sora’s farm; it was days later that Bonifacio fled to Balara. Why Raymundo persists in this error is obvious: he was losing his mind, drowning in his excrement and being lapped by dogs in the G.I. prisons of Bilibid, damn damn damn damn etc. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
518 Raymundo seems to conflate two incidents here, the “feasts” before the Cry of Balintawak, and the haphazard rustling-cum-butchering of stray animals and other forms of theft during the starvation-ridden, swamp-swimming escapades of the rebels as they ran and hid from the Guardia Civil. In truth, between battles many of the rebels went back to their hometowns, kind of going on recess, to resume their duties as tax collector or plowman, and rejoined the war kapag tumawag ang himagsikan: when revolution called. A grueling schedule, and honestly few could hack it; some just stayed home, hiding with their carabaos, which by then were dying of the rindpest, an incidental plague that also contributed to the failure of the rebels’ war. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
519 Some say the host of the revolutionaries in the days leading to revolt was the old lady Tandang Sora, a generous farmer; others say it was some unnamed gentleman with a huge granary near what is now Quezon City. Here, Raymundo adds his two cents. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
520 Sure enough, outside Manila, in Cavite, they ate him up alive. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
521 Una maga maldita (Trans. Note)
522 Austin Coates, the most empathic and elegant among Rizal’s many biographers, notes that in Talisay in 1895 “[Josephine] gave birth to a stillborn child—a boy. It would seem that at the time of the shock, no one was in the house except for Maria’s [Rizal’s sister’s] infant son . . . in any event help came, and Rizal was able to do what was necessary to save her life. The same night he took the tiny body of his son and went alone to a secluded part of the vale, where he dug a grave and buried it, so concealing the place before returning to the house that no one ever knew where it was.” (Trans. Note)
Entry #43
With the third in the bag, I mean. The one on my back, in my goat like a bag. Oh you know: a posteriori.
—He’s living in the mountains of Maragondon, Matandang Leon added.
Like that shiver that occurs when a passage in a book happens exactly as you had imagined, so my body responded to
