Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10

by Dean Francis Alfar

“I have heard much about you, Herr Mercado,” Klara said.

  “Good things, I hope?” he asked, with some trepidation.

  “Perhaps,” she answered coyly.

  Klara bowed and motioned for Joseph to follow her. She said nothing more, as they walked out onto the path toward one of the guest cottages. Once they reached the rustic, ivy-covered hut, she offered a quick goodbye and left.

  Joseph stared at the monastic simplicity of his new quarters. It was even more depressing than his garret in Berlin. The floor was made of clay bricks, and the walls were rough logs, hewn and pegged into place. There was a small fireplace, also made of brick, straw chairs, and a hard board for a bed. A thin mattress was spread on top, along with a pillow and a few quilts. A lonely washstand shared a corner with an old chamber pot. He felt a great panic come over him, and had to sit still for a second to calm down.

  Afterward, Joseph went to the window and watched, as Klara walked toward the lake. When she disappeared from view, he opened his suitcase and took out his Stenhouse Lung Protector. He put on the white mask and, without bothering to get out of his clothes, succumbed to his personal demons.

  After cleaning up, he dressed as comfortably as he could, and dove under the safety of the covers. For some reason, Joseph started to weep, and his tears didn’t let up until he finally fell asleep.

  “SPINDLE WHORLS AND stone beaters to make bark cloth have been found in Philippine Neolithic assemblages from as early as 2,740 ACE. Written records of first contact, such as the Zhufan Zhi from the Song Dynasty, indicate that the clothing Filipinos wore served decorative or ritual purposes, rather than as a means of protecting modesty.”

  – Francisco Pölzl, The Ferdinand C. Ashley Academic Journal of Ancient History, (1936)

  DINNER WAS NOT altogether unpleasant. Joseph was pleased that everyone was appropriately attired. The food was rustic country fare: weißwurscht, head cheese and Brezen pretzels, finished with a syllabub of Bavarian cream, thickened with isinglass. In his honor, Professor Lebenskünstler had broken out some excellent silvaners of Franconian vintage.

  The vintage of the dinner guests was another matter. A schoolteacher from the village asked him where in the Caribbean was Las Islas Felipenas. A tall, bearded poet from Hanover tried to converse with him about Plato’s Republic and the responsibilities of writers to the state.

  Klara pulled him away, warning that the Hanoverian was an urning, one who would have gone Socratic on him in the worst possible way. Meanwhile, Professor Lebenskünstler lectured endlessly on social nudism, and how it promoted fairness and equality.

  The Hanoverian sidled by him again. Joseph felt mildly uncomfortable, but did his best to conceal it.

  “Do you know he is not really an academic?” the Hanoverian whispered conspiratorially.

  “Do you mean Dr. Lebenskünstler?” Joseph asked.

  “We call him ‘Professor’ and ‘Doctor’ out of respect,” the man said. “His mother was Catholic and made him choose between the priesthood and his inheritance. Naturally, he chose neither. Herr Lebenskünstler lives for books and he is very learned. Sadly, he never actually completed his doctorate.”

  “You seem to know a lot about him.”

  “I make it my business to know things.”

  “But do you believe in what the professor espouses?”

  “Ha! If people move past the barrier of looks and race, we humans will find some new way to draw lines. Perhaps it will be wealth or maybe sexual preference.”

  “If you are such a skeptic, why are you here?” Joseph asked.

  “Ah, I myself am only sunning au naturel for my health,” the Hanoverian replied. “Wolpertinger Luftbad is cheaper than Italy.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “The things that separate one person from another are so rarely skin deep,” the poet noted, returning to his earlier point. “Do not tell me that is not the case as well, even in your distant islands?”

  “My people are not like that. We are renowned for our friendliness and hospitality.”

  “Your delightful apropos-of-nothing is the bottle of Bocksbeutel talking,” the Hanoverian quipped. “I’ll have you know, I notice that you flinch whenever I come near. Are you afraid, Herr Mercado, that I will look at you with the same male gaze that you look at Fraulein Klara there?”

  “What? No!” Joseph exclaimed in indignation. “I would never –”

  “There, you are drawing up a new caste system already. Perhaps you should stick to the local beer,” the man from Hanover suggested. “It will call far less attention to your charming naiveté. Good evening, Herr Mercado.”

  “THE ARUMEN MANUVU of Cotabato believed that Ala-ta-Ala, the god of all gods, and Magbabaya, the creator, send messages to mankind through the gimokud, who were disembodied sacred souls. These spirits possessed the wali-an, the clairvoyant shamans of the Manuvu, who spoke the word of the gods.

  They believed that people had no agency, unless moved by higher powers. This relegated the concept of free will to an insignificant position, something still common to the people of the islands to this very day.

  ‘Bahala na,’ Filipinos like to say. The gods would always provide.”

  – Dolores del Mundo, Collected Papers (2012)

  JOSEPH TRIED TO spend his time writing, in the quiet of his room. However, despite his attempt at self-isolation, the other guests insisted on inviting him to one activity after another. He played tennis with the Nordic-looking youths he’d met at the drawing room. The schoolteacher brought him to see the village of Dießen am Ammersee. The Hanoverian introduced him to some mawkish English writers of the Uranian persuasion. He indulged all of them, but always, always, he kept his clothes on.

  Klara had also come to call. She invited him for a picnic by the lake on the occasion of his third afternoon at the sanitarium. Much as Joseph was attracted to her, no words could persuade him to join her in the altogether.

  “At least leave your coat and that silly hat behind,’ she insisted. “What have you to hide?”

  Joseph smiled awkwardly and just shrugged his shoulders, flattered that she showed him some interest. He was usually very talkative and loved to dominate conversations. But with Klara, he seemed to run out of words.

  When they reached the shore of the lake, the young woman turned toward him and unbuttoned his shirt to the waist. Joseph was too paralyzed to protest. He ate a simple meal of sausages and sweet potatoes, in his camisa de chino undershirt. Afterward, the smell of her skin and the softness of her touch lingered in his thoughts for hours.

  “EVEN UNDER THE guise of magic and tradition, the ancient Filipinos had some rudimentary knowledge of genetics and the selection of phenotypes. This was evidenced by the sacred camote (sweet potato) rituals of Samar and Leyte.

  After a field was burned and cleared, tubers were taken from a fruitful old field, and the farmers waited for the full moon, to plant. They needed a waxing orb, so that the sweet potatoes would become very smooth. If there were lots of stars out during the planting, this meant that the camote would be numerous and all joined together.

  Before the planting was done, a young couple made love in the field, and the young man offered his first seed to Lakambakod, the protector of crops. Planting naked ensured that the camote skins would be thin. After that, the man made the woman ride on his back, as he planted the rest of the tubers. It was believed that this would increase the chances of the tubers overlapping.

  From an ethnobotanical perspective, this shows the complex relationship between Filipinos, their cosmological system, and the plants they grew. They knew that while a sweet potato would always be a sweet potato, there were many ways to influence the final form it could grow into.”

  – Ferdinand Blumenttrit, Philippine Journal of Science (1910)

  ON HIS FIFTH day at Wolpertinger, Joseph noticed a large pile of logs stacked not far from his cabin. He asked the housekeeper what they were for.

  “They are for back-up steam devils,”
the woman answered, as she hitched her dogs to a milk cart. “Sometimes there is not enough sunshine for the collectors. The professor needs to find someone to chop them into firewood.”

  “I could do it,” Joseph offered. “I used to chop wood as a child.”

  “Herr Mercado,” the housekeeper chuckled, as she picked up her distaff and a basket of wool, for spinning. “Danke, but that would be difficult if not impossible for a young man of your frame and stature. Besides, you are a guest here.”

  “A non-paying one,” he muttered. Here in Europe, I am a pauper and a weakling.

  “Anyway, it is good you sought me out,” she added. “It saves me the trouble of looking for you. The professor has asked that you come by his study, anytime you are free today.”

  Joseph thanked the housekeeper, and went over to the main house.

  “Professor Lebenskünstler?” Joseph asked, as he knocked on the heavily-carved study door. A large wooden owl stared at him, as it sat on a reproduction of Spinoza’s Ethics. A small banner curled around its taloned feet, bearing the words: ‘ut legitur, et illuminamini’ – to read is to be enlightened.

  The old man bade him come in. As Joseph had expected, the good doctor was sitting in his armchair, comfortably naked.

  “How is your rest?” the professor asked. “I trust you have not been too uncomfortable.”

  “I am sleeping just fine,” Joseph replied, “and everyone has been unexpectedly – welcoming.”

  “Wolpertinger is an oasis of sanity,” the old man said. “This is neither Madrid nor Berlin.”

  “I am grateful for that.”

  “Think of this as a kreislauf – that is an old Bavarian word, for a bout of mental rest.”

  “It has been all that and more, thank you.”

  “You are most welcome. Professor Blumenttrit has told me that Berlin is crawling with the men of Conde de Benomar. It is best that you stay here with us for a while.”

  “I had actually expected to join Professor Blumenttrit at Litoměřice.”

  “No, that is not a wise idea,” the professor warned. ”Our mutual friend is a known agitator. There will be many agents watching him all the time.”

  “I realize that, sir,” Joseph sighed.

  “Well, you are certainly safer here. After Leopold failed to win the Spanish crown, Bavaria has been no friend of Spain. The good count will have trouble placing his men.”

  “Did Professor Blumenttrit tell you why he wanted me to come here?”

  “He only told me that you needed a place to think and to hide.”

  “That is true. But why did he send me here in particular?”

  “I am told that you are an author,” the professor remarked, ignoring Joseph’s question. “Yet Herr Blumenttrit has told me that you’ve stopped writing. Why is that?”

  “I am – not sure. There was a time I couldn’t stop the words from flowing. Now I cannot even string a sentence together. At this rate, I will never write my third novel,” Joseph lamented.

  “Perhaps the time for writing is done?” the professor asked.

  “When I started, anger stirred my spirit,” Joseph continued. “My family was rich, and we were very comfortable. But in Las Islas Felipenas, even money was no protection. My family was persecuted. My brother was jailed for protesting a rice tax on the poor. If you were an indio, your life had no true value. You belonged – body and soul – to the Church and to the Crown.”

  “Any one of those is a reason to take arms.”

  “So you say. But reforms must come from above. A savage insurrection will only end in blood.”

  “By ‘above’, you mean from the elites and intellectuals such as yourself? Is that why you chose to write stories instead?”

  “Yes, I had sketched this idea for an alternate world – an alternate history, really – one without the distractions of our modern technology. I wrote a nested narrative about an author, who had also written a book about yet another fictional writer.”

  “In my story,” Joseph went on, “a good man named Jose Rizal wanted to change the world, using only words as weapons. He wrote two imaginary books called Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, in which his protagonist, Crisostomo Ibarra, suffers great persecution from the church and state. In the end, however, Ibarra chooses peace over armed struggle. Rizal himself would be arrested and executed. His death would become the catalyst for a doomed revolution. My third book would have focused on the nobility of my people, on their inherent love for peace. I thought also of extrapolating future events, perhaps from a hundred years hence.”

  “That sounds – interesting, if a bit too fantastical for my taste. I am curious as to why you wrote them as scientific romances,” the old man questioned. “Surely your message would have been more effective as proper, realist fiction?”

  “Scientific romances are as marginalized as my people.” Joseph answered. “Realism is neurotically obsessed with itself. It offers no norms, nothing to reach for. I wanted to reach the masses, the common people who dream about better futures. Scientific romances are all about possibility, roads that move forward, not those that loop around in navel-gazing eternities.”

  “Yet all fiction is permutation. There is always change.”

  “Right now all I want is for us to be treated as equals, and have proper representation in the Cortes. The masses want revolution and blood. I need a third novel to correct this notion. Violence is never the answer.”

  “There is a time and place for everything, even fighting” the professor insisted. “Your people are already taking your words and shaping their future with their own hands. Why would you change that?”

  “What does it matter? I am a dead man, regardless. My two little books have caused great controversy, and my life now imitates my art. I am sure to end up like Rizal and face a firing squad. Although, if Benomar’s Hermandad ever found me out, they wouldn’t waste a bullet on an indio – they would simply break my neck.”

  “So stay here,” the professor urged. “Write your other novel. Stay here and at least stay alive. Anyway, the ones who write eventually control the world.”

  “That would be nice if it were true,” Joseph said. “You have treated me so well. I like it here. It’s so different from everywhere else. But – it can’t make up for what I’ve gone through, or the suffering of those I’ve left behind. This is just one place, one small thing.”

  “You are right, of course. However, everything starts with just one small thing,” the old man mused. “The West has abused you and your people, but it has also sheltered and nurtured you. In my own limited way, I understand your conflict.”

  “I am not sure I myself understand it.”

  “And you have no wish to go back and fight?” the professor repeated. “As I said, a handful of your words have already lit the fires of revolution. That makes you an ideal leader.”

  “I – I don’t know about that. Are you sure my friend said nothing, Herr Professor?” Joseph asked, not wanting to speak his mind further, or disrespect his host. “I am honestly not sure what I’m supposed to do here.”

  “Well, he did ask me to tell you something else, something quite peculiar: ‘Mene, Thecel, Phares’. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Yes, I used it in my last book. It’s a crucial line from Rizal’s El Filibusterismo, but it was originally from the Book of Daniel,” Joseph explained. “It was a mysterious message left on the wall of King Belshazzar’s palace. One that he’d asked the prophet to interpret.”

  “Hmm. I always thought the correct line was ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’,” Professor Lebenskünstler mused.

  “Why did he tell you this? What did he mean by it?”

  “I am afraid that was all he told me. I know of that phrase, though. It’s usually taken as an idiom.”

  “Yes, it is,” Joseph sighed. “It means that the future is predetermined.”

  “I refuse to believe that,” the old man said gruffly, “and neither should you. Seek
shelter when necessary, yes. But make a decision on what you need to do. Do not bury your head in the sand forever.”

  With that, the conversation ended. Joseph thanked his host once more, and returned to his room.

  On the way back, he saw Klara playing tennis. Beautiful Klara, strange Klara, a woman with whom every tactile moment intimated infinity.

  For some reason, Joseph felt the void calling for him again. He was seized by the same darkness he had felt in the brothels and bierbrauerie of Berlin. It was as if a great weight had suddenly pressed on his heart – the weight of a frozen life, the birth pains of a stillborn country, the infernal blackness of cities, and the oppressive insecurity of a brown body in a sea of infallible white.

  He ran toward his cabin like a madman, stripping off his hat and clothes as he went. By the time he reached his quarters, he was completely naked. Joseph locked the door and shut the crinoline blinds. He jumped onto his bed and lost himself to the darkness. This time he did not cry.

  THAT EVENING, JOSEPH skipped dinner. He slept fitfully, beset by troubled dreams.

  I, Joseph Alonso y Mercado, found myself in an enormous library filled with nothing but books – books that different versions of myself, scattered infinitely through time and space, had always written. I saw thousands of volumes of poetry, historical annotations, meditations on women, language, moral values, mythology, pre-history, taxonomy, and others.

  Feeling restless, I wandered about until I saw the shelves that held my precious novels. A great dread filled my soul, when I realized that all of them were just the same two books – The Social Cancer and The Reign of Greed, An Eagle Flight and The Filibustering, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo – different titles, but always the same pair, and nothing more. There never was and never would be a third novel.

  Terrified, I ran toward a mirrored portal, and found myself at the entrance of a cave on the peak of a mystical mountain called Banahaw. Eleven heroes of old, of the future, and of myth waited for me, toasting lambanog toddy and Vin Mariani.

  The begged me to lead them to battle, for I was a be-knighted National Hero, the greatest Medal of Honor which the Highest and Most Honorable Society of the Children of Las Islas Felipenas could bestow.