“Vila-Matas” and I

 

In “Cascais,” the second section of Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas—co-translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott—we learn that the protagonist, unnamed, is one to whom things happen. 

After I finished the “Paris” section, which the reader has possibly just read, I went three years without writing anything at all, totally adrift. What’s more, no sooner had I stopped writing than things started happening to me—a very strange development. It’s not that things didn’t happen to me before, but the things that started happening once I’d abandoned my desk all had something in common: they met every requirement for being turned into stories, and indeed they demanded it, almost crying out to be told. [italics in translation]

When things begin to happen to a writer, one can expect a novel. Lived experience becomes raw material, shaping character and plot. Walking through the streets of Paris, Cascais, Montevideo, or Buenos Aires enables him to take stock of his surroundings, to admire the archways of façades and the grilles of entrances, and, above all, to reflect on his predicaments. Thus, our blocked writer found himself following the advice of another novelist.

you’ll soon realize that the most important thing is not dying for ideas, styles, or theories but rather taking a step back and maintaining a distance between ourselves and the things that happen to us.

The narrator of Montevideo was a different novelist in each section because of the temporal dimension. What he recounted in the “Cascais” section while looking back at the “Paris” section was already separated by time. The writer of the first section was a figure of the past, an older self. The narrator of the second section was situated in the present. The “novelist” of the first was not the “I” of the second. However, they might share some preferences and their relationship was hardly a hostile one. After all, the amazing things happening to the writer of the present would likely find their way into another “I,” the novelist of the future, however much the present novelist sought to put distance between his present self and his past self.  

While responding to an interview at a literary event, the present novelist could not shake off the impression that he was faking it, that he was exaggerating his present self.

As I spoke, I deliberately gave a misleading impression of myself, going overboard in my efforts to make everyone think I was the sort of writer to whom extraordinary things happened but who then approached them in writing with a certain distance, a kind of cold impartiality, as if they had nothing to do with him. And I explained how this was a kind of unconscious defense mechanism that all these writers carry with them wherever they go. Such a writer might, I said, be railing furiously at his girlfriend, while she rages back, at which point he abruptly stops and asks: “Do you mind if I write about this?” With the following reaction from her: “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been saying? Are you even genuinely angry?” To which he might respond that yes, he’s livid, but there’s still a part of him that’s taken up with the question of how it all ought to feel, really feel, and even at that very moment he’s wondering how to describe the scene, including his reflections about how it ought to feel, which for him is a matter of great importance.

The “I” of the present was wary of his past writer self because the latter had the propensity to magnify and falsify (fictionalize) events. Thus, the “I” also distrusts his present unreliable novelist self, because he inherited this tendency from his embroidering past self. But writers must live, let themselves go on living, and embrace their literary contrivance if only to feed their fictional machine, which serves to justify their creative practice against the encroaching slop of artificial intelligence. They surrealistically imagine what's behind closed doors, invent and open doors within doors to penetrate the unknown and discover the unknowable.

If a writer is any good, he knows his contribution is now out of his hands. It is read by readers who happen upon the novel. Little by little, he can no longer detect himself in his published books. The novel ceases to be his own, belonging instead to language, tradition, and perhaps later to oblivion.

At the end of Montevideo, after a certain protracted war of attrition (between reader and writer), “Vila-Matas,” the unnamed stand-in for Vila-Matas, might or might not have realized that the novel was finished. His friend, a “French writer,” had the last say:

“Lately you’ve become a writer to whom things really happen. Let’s hope you understand your destiny ... Your destiny—the key to the new door—is in your hands.”

Vila-Matas almost knew perfectly well who had written the last page.

Novel-gazing

 

Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott (Yale University Press, 2025)

 

I have it all planned out—my reading list for the year. I have carefully slotted the book titles into each of the 12 months of 2026. The Excel worksheet was auto-saved. Then I picked up the book Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas at the end of December 2025, and it wreaked havoc on my reading list. The narrator of the novel spouted interesting titles and authors left and right: books, for example, by Elizabeth Hardwick, Antonio Tabucchi, Augusto Monterroso, and some “French writers.” I wanted to add them to my already groaning book list. This year I will need extreme time-management skills if I want to make headway with my list. As if compiling a reading list of actual books were not enough, one also has to contend with nonexistent books by nonexistent authors, which not only complicate or muddy the list but also automatically make it a fictional one.

The narrator was a novelist who happened to be suffering from a profound writer's block. Who would have thought that the condition of writer's block could be a fertile ground for writing an entire novel, or two novels, or even three, or even more.   

The unnamed young Spanish narrator also happens to be a drug dealer (“hash, marijuana, and cocaine”) in Paris. Of course, this narrator never really recounted a single incident about his shady profession, never discussed his tawdry transactions or his wayward clients. Although he “embarked on a life of crime,” his stories were not filled with unliterary escapades. He adopted the tone of “controlled meaninglessness, bordering on pretense” and name-dropped every modernist novelist from his arsenal he could conveniently insert into his narrative. The writers (and their works) were so carefully chosen and cautiously dropped like bombs that they formed a curated list of precursor novelists.

So what we have are his notes on reading and his reportage on not-writing, a creative and novelistic form of solipsism mediated by books—what else—and so a clever solipsist in a way. We read his ramblings in Paris and other cities, all bemoaning the lost ability to express in writing his human condition. He created this patchwork of a reading life, very much aware of his own literary posturing, and very much self-referential in invoking his various precursor “French”  novelists.

His humor could be so dry that one was unsure it was not meant to be serious at all. I wanted to think he was sincere yet unfunny.

I also remembered the exorbitant Thomas Wolfe, who, in his eagerness to take in all the world’s stories, drowned in the storm of those materials that seemed to evade his grasp. This eagerness of Wolfe’s to rule over time could be seen in his torrential first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, which included some words that I’ve always deemed worthy of constant reflection and that could be said to form the crux of my own poetics: 

“We seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane.… Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.” 

He was taking things out of context, pushing his way into his own literary sandbox. He was sharing his “readings” of literary novel-gazing, which was practically a reading of his own life. Ultimately he produced his “unwritten” novel, yet another (extended) meditation about a writer of No, but a writer not wearing his Noh mask and instead volubly sharing a pastiche of literary quotations. The novelist was flexing his practical skills in literary criticism. Spot on was his reading of Roberto Bolaño:

laughing away in his cave in Blanes and flaunting his magnificent refusal to conform to the work of those contemporaries whose writing he didn’t like, which was most of them, although his opinions were liable to change. Understandable, really, given that he liked to be arbitrary and make lists and not take literature too seriously, which, in my opinion, has always been the best way of taking it in any way seriously.   

We could relax while reading Montevideo because our character was not serious at all. He was the slightly older version of the neophyte writer in Never Any End to Paris. He was full of contradictions and absurdities. That was probably why he was a winsome character even if somewhat of a dolt. He had a predilection for “French writers” (Lispector, Gracq, Ida Vitale, Felisberto Hernández, Felipe Polleri, Harry Mathews, Madeleine Moore, and the Comte de Lautréamont) whose Frenchness was not defined by their nationality.

I can hardly contain my excitement as I prepare to say this: the writers I like the most are the very model of the coldest, most rapierlike intelligence, the ones who push to the limit what someone once called the “frightful discipline of the spirit.” And that’s it; I could finish there. But I think it’s worth adding that perhaps the quality I most admire in “French writers” is their absolute autonomy. Because the truly extraordinary thing about literature is that it’s a space of such immense freedom that it allows for all kinds of contradictions. For instance, within a single paragraph you can both believe and not believe in Madeleine Moore.

We may believe and not believe in that last sentence. The reader in us could catch a whiff of that immense space of freedom embedded in certain novels of this ilk.  

Montevideo's echoes, affinities, and tangential connections to Vila-Matas's previous books were so pronounced they were no longer echoes and affinities but direct connections in the fictional metaverse. Our drug dealer was the author of a novel called Virtuosos of Suspense, which he “wrote without a care in the world and that has haunted me ever since in a most worrying way, as if it were the only book I’d ever written.”

Oh, I’d been waiting so long for someone to release me from that excruciating phrase [“I would prefer not to”], that ghastly cliché that’s haunted me ever since I published Virtuosos of Suspense, in which, some twenty years ago, I investigated cases of writers affected by that syndrome “of the No” I called “Rimbaud syndrome”! Over time that book became a nightmare, one I’ve learned to live with in recent years, a nightmare buried under my skin like the apple Gregor Samsa’s father threw at him, which lodged itself in Gregor’s flesh and eventually rotted.

It was as if the success of Bartleby & Co. Virtuosos of Suspense had overshadowed the literary enterprise of our novelist, so he had to exorcise it with more literary ramblings. He was so consumed by the success of his creation that he had to concoct a different medicine with the same generic name. Because Enrique Vila-Matas was short on ideas and brimming with comp lit insights, he borrowed the wide-eyed sincerity and pretentious tendencies of the protagonist of Never Any End to Paris, the germ of literature sickness in Bartleby & Co., and the schematic architecture of Montano's Malady to come up with this drug.

Proper novels are bygones, replaced by stories of literary possibilities. Not that we've nearly exhausted all possible permutations and sequences of plot points in a story; perhaps now the only possible ground for novelistic exploration lies in critiquing those stories.

Hence, we accompanied our novelist drug dealer's adventures in multiple cities of literary imagination. Serial name-dropper, he was also a serial quote-dropper. In Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (The University of Chicago Press, 2023), Jonathan Kramnick considers the practice of literary criticism as the perfection of creative writing skills and its unique methods: “Quotation is the art of moving across two orders of writing, one's own and someone else's.” Hence, Kramnick viewed the practice of quotation as close reading, a sui generis skill for a literary critic.

For in-sentence quotation, the know-how is that of weaving another person’s words with your own so you gently alter both, so that some sort of third space emerges in the process of interpretation. For block or between-sentence quotation, the know-how is that of adjusting your own idiom so that it reveals something about another’s, either by way of contrast or connection.

Our novelist then, who in Paris led a life of crime, exhibited (in the words of Kramnick) “deft treatment of language—the craftwork of spinning sentences from sentences already in the world.” His skill “is ... a discipline-specific way that the literary humanities tell important truths about the world.”

Back to Montevideo. Saddled with “the burden of speaking out against novels with plots” and consigned to perpetually evaluate his own life against the aphorisms and ideas of “French writers,” our narrator managed to splice together quotes and passages from books and writers deserving our modernist attention. His bookish ideas and writerly predilections were his means of dissecting his own “style,” after Nabokov in the quote our narrator shared “The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.” What a style it was—seemingly unstructured incidents and ideas that were nevertheless shaped by a sensitivity of a passionate and obsessive literatus.

Our narrator was almost ready to admit his fictivity or fictiveness, yet he persisted in asserting his own reality, his own freedom and will. The clash of fact and fiction was most evident in the “Montevideo” section of the book—the third one after the “Paris” and “Cascais” sections—where our drug dealer was in search of the actual hotel room that was the basis of Julio Cortázar 's story about a sealed door.

In this portrait of a novelist as a drug pusher—but really he was a drug addict as well, or more accurately a book addict, which also made him a book pusher. I meant to compare book addicts with book pushers, though not to equate drug addicts with drug pushers. Montevideo appeared in Spanish in 2022. If Vila-Matas's character visited Manila between the years 2016 and 2022, the period corresponding to Rodrigo Duterte's presidency, and he wrote about it, the novel would have turned into a horror story for he might end up as one of the thousands of individuals summarily executed by the Duterte police state. End of digression. – The novelist was a recommender of unsolicited novels—an accusation he leveled against his tour guide in Montevideo. He unapologetically deals in books like he deals in drugs and cherishes the freedom granted novelists to inveigle their characters into one absurd situation after another. We would not know the merits of his arguments if we were not familiar with the potentially addictive writers and books he recommends. Yet the novel still should come with a trigger warning, particularly for serious readers who never take books seriously.

I'm in the “Bogotá” section (p. 132) of the book.  

 

Related posts:

Vila-Matas's lecture novel 

Bartleby has company

The healing powers of mediocre fiction

Carte blance

A catalogue of misbehaving things

 

 

Originally self-published in 2014, Ang Kompedio ng mga Imposibleng Bagay (The Compendium of Impossible Objects) by Carlo Paulo Pacolor, was reprinted in an expanded edition by the indie publisher Everything's Fine in 2022. Soleil David, who is translating the collection, received the 2025 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Translation Fellowship for the book.

 

Everything's Fine also produced a four-story translation sampler from the book. Presented side by side, the sampler itself was a work of art (check their IG post). I grabbed a copy of both the compendium and the four-some sampler during last year's Manila International Book Fair in SM Megamall.

   

Below is a catalogue of the impossible stories:

 

• From “Silid I” (Room I, translated by Soleil David):
  
  
  I need your most effective lock, so that even I couldn’t get out, and if I lost my keys there would be no way to get back in.
  
  
  Later:
  
  
  I can’t open it, I can’t.

•  In “Salita” (Speech), surreal imagery: the violin, like two cats exchanging opinions about the sharpness of their claws.

• “Dila”: Is it just me, or is this story a comment on capitalism and materialism?
  
  From “Tongue” (translated Soleil David):

Along with the vomitus was the bile from her guts, but also she threw up diamonds and pearls, their heft tinkling and pinging against the restaurant's tiled floor. ... and all around her the rush and stampede ... where it wasn't just her co-workers who dropped to their knees and scrambled.

• In “Aparador” (Cabinet): A third-person narrator meditates on the existence of a cabinet, among other objects: 

Is it enough to be a thing, to persist ... ? ... When the owner arrives, once the key opens the lock, all of these turn into fiction. 

 

The “Bagay” in the collection title could be translated as object or thing. “Object” is appropriate because the stories often deal with literal objects and the objectification of people and the anthropomorphism of objects. Not to mention the author's propensity for exploring the subject-object dichotomy in their other works. On the other hand, “thing” universalizes our shared thing-ness.

 

The story ended thus: Tony Perez, pagkayari. (Tony Perez, after the fact.). A nod to the urban legend quality of the preceding, and to Perez, the purveyor of horror stories.

• In “Bugtong” (Riddle): What riddle is it where the answer is the human heart?

Here is another surreal (love) story in this impossible compendium. The heart, after all, is the most impossible thing. Or object.

• “Pares-Pares” (Pairs) is told in brief snatches. The details create an adulterous atmosphere.  

• “Mandelbrot Set” tells the story of a woman encountering a stranger, a double or a “repetition” of her husband. Life, she finds, is not as tidy as the mathematically perfect pattern of embroidery on a tablecloth.

She had no need for happiness. ... Happiness – what would I even do with it, is it spare change I can put in my pockets, is it stain I can wipe off my face, is it a song I can hum? [trans. Soleil David].  

• “Seismometer” is surprisingly absent from the book's table of contents. But did I just read the story? Did we just have an earthquake? In 1999, we were all waiting intently for the apocalypse that we felt disappointed when it didn't arrive. The Big One is nowhere and all around us.

• “Silid II” (Room 2) is the sequel of “Silid I”. Understatement of the year.

• In “Tala” (Star): What happens when a fortune teller falls in love and, while searching for answers and the object of love, spontaneously combusts? 

• In “Pagkatapos Nito” (After This), we listen to “Cry Me a River” by Julie London. Elsewhere, we hear “Summertime” by Sarah Vaughan. The theme songs of the compendium are dope.

•  “Tungkol sa Nawawalang Isla ng Sangkabayagan” (About the Lost Island of Manosphere). Not sure how to translate that last word in the title. “Patriarchy”? “Manhood”? “World of Men”? “Men-kind”? It literally means “kingdom of testicles.”  

A group of military men defended a palace from egg-throwers. There’s a wordplay in the story about bayag (manhood) and bayan (nationhood). It's a fantastical and fabulous fable on toxic masculinity. The light touch was masterful and guffaw-inducing, making it the standout story in the collection. 

• “Extant” was the final and longest story in the compendium. A character played a video game called Calvary X, which opened doors into the unknown. “Extant” was a Borgesian story of multiple doors and forking paths. The number of possible combinations of doors was 360 x 359 x 358. This impossibility blended the supernatural, obsession, and mystery. Its flavor of nightmare reminded me of the films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi. 

 

Pacolor's Ang Kompedio ng mga Imposibleng Bagay ventures into the mysterious, unknown, and perhaps unknowable territories of the body, heart, and mind. It creates skewed worlds and dark atmospheres that should hardly exist, yet do so within the logic of dreams and waking life.

 

3 zines by Aris Remollino

 

I've been reading three poetry chapbooks (or zines) by Aris Remollino: Manhid (DWB Publishing Philippines, 2024); Gabi, Umaga, Sinigang (Alagwa Books, 2025); and Mga Madaling-araw sa 7-Eleven (Alagwa Books, 2025). Four, if you count his flash fiction zine, the playfully titled Wansapanataymderwaseylabistori (Alagwa Books, 2025).

Manhid (Apathy) is probably the best of the lot, a powerful collection about the nightmare world of heinous killings under the Duterte regime. In "Konsensya" (Conscience), the gun as a metaphor for man, and vice versa, is a dueling image that questions what triggers the human capacity to end a life: "Hindi dapat / maging tao / ang baril." (The gun should / not become / a man.). The reversal of that statement at the end of the poem (The man should / not become / a gun.) is the inversion of personification: the depersonalization of the man as shooter, the anthropomorphizing of tragedy, of violence itself.

Other favorite poems in the zine (actually, all of them): "Eskenita" (Alley), with its fiery image at the end where the gunman, puffing on his cigarette, sets his head on fire; and "Troll" with its manifesto-like depiction of the language of tyranny: 

Hindi totoo ang totoo, 
kung ayaw ng Pangulo. 
Totoo ang hindi totoo 
kung ibig ng Pangulo.

(The truth is not true 
if the President says so. 
The lie is the truth 
if the President deems it so.) 

The President, the ultimate troll-master, controls the narrative. The import of his words spells life and death, as in the poem's final lines: 

Mabubuhay kayo 
kung ibig ng Pangulo. 
Mamamatay kayo 
kung ayaw ng Pangulo.

(You shall live 
if the President commands.
You shall die 
if the President demands.)

In their insightful essay Mula sa Panahon ng Epektibong Komunikasiyon, isang rejoinder sa bokabularyo ng dalawang Duterte (From the Era of Effective Communication, a rejoinder on the vocabulary of the two Dutertes), Carlo Paulo Pacolor locates the virulence of the Dutertes' and their troll-minions' (messenger/apparatus) extraordinary meta-narratives in the virality and absurdity of the message (content): 

Sa hyper na realidad ng digital/internet/artificial intelligence, ang duplikasiyon ng wangis, ang siyang pinaka-atraksiyon sa pagkakatulad-tulad, ay isa lamang hakbang sa mas pinalawak na ekspresiyon ng pagdanas sa sarili. Kung bagahe ng organikong taong nilalang ang pagsusuma ng politikal at historikal, sa artipisyalidad ng digital ay pwede niya itong i-"unpack" – ikaw ang user, ikaw ang vlogger, ikaw ang mismong avatar, sa siste na produkto ka ng isang libreng plataporma (Facebook, Tiktok, X, Youtube). Ikaw iyon na hindi ikaw. Kaya ikaw rin na hindi ikaw ang troll, ang shitposter, ang alter, ang influencer, ang edgelord sa comment section, ikaw ang DDS, ang kakampink, ang lurker. 

* * * 

Viral ang brand ng Duterte, kumalat at pinakalat, litera­lisasiyon din baga ng memetic quality ng anumang ideya, hindi dahil sa popularidad mismo (content), kun'di sa pinaka-behikulo na nagpapa-popularisa (apparatus); para itong earworm, tunog na hindi maalis-alis sa iyong kukote, at kahit hindi ka naman pukáw ng lyrics ay bakit mo nga rin kabisado? "My god, I hate drugs" ang isang halimbawa ng viral gag na hindi mo pwedeng basahin nang hindi gamit ang boses ni Tatay Digong kahit anong gawin mo, isama na rin ang hanggan-hanggan niyang ekstem­poranyo bawat hatinggabi no'ng kasagsagan ng Covid-19 pan­demic. Ang virality ng Duterte ay hindi mula sa duplikasiyon at reproduksiyon ng wangis; ginawang pamarisan, sa halip, at na­normalisa ang pagdistrungka sa mga nakasanayang gawi nang pagtanggap sa impormasiyon para panlansag sa kritikalidad na mula naman sa paggamit ng evidentiary facts na siyang nagtataguyod sana ng pagkalinga sa katotohanan. Nanlunod ng atakeng spam ang mga trolls, DDS man o hindi, at nagkatawang avatar ang kanilang kinatawan sa pinakamapanikis nitong pagsasaka­tawan: kung mamaril ang kanyang mga pulis, dahil kasi nan­labán ang biktima, at mula sa direktang wika ng isang Tatay Digong na siya ang sasalo ng sisí sa anumang paglabag, sabay na naabswelto ang nagsakatawan ng utos na pandarahas, at napawalambisa pa nga ang mismong pandarahas. Habang ang bik­tima ng krimen? "If you die, I'm sorry (not sorry)." 

There's a lot to unpack in Carlo Paulo Pacolor's arguments, but their point about the twisting of truth (deception) to conform to the fictive narrative is embodied in the chilling poems of Manhid like "Troll" and "Sabi-sabi" (Rumors), where Aris Remollino gave voice to the mastermind of the killings himself.  

The poems in Manhid are a powerful, anthemic record of a brutal regime, and a reminder that the gun, the troll, and the killer are someone in power, and they are also every one who falls prey to (or is deceived by) the slippery, double-edged language of evil. Our inability to parse truth from lie, dignity from cruelty, enabled a regime to spout propaganda as part of its "effective communication," emboldened it to take so many lives. Perhaps only poetry can unmask the avatars of our folly. 

Below are three poems I translated from each zine. 

* * *  

The title poem from Manhid:

  

Apathy 

Killing is easy.
Just rip out the heart
from every part
of your body.

Rip out the heart
from your feet:
Anything you trample on,
you can crush.

Rip out the heart
from your hands:
Anything you hold,
you can strangle.

Rip out the heart
from your eyes:
Anything you see,
you can burn.

Rip out the heart
from inside your mind:
All your problems,
you can obliterate.

Killing is easy.
Just rip out the heart
from your body:
It will be easy to tear out
other people’s hearts
from their bodies.

 

* * * 

 

from Gabi, Umaga, Sinigang (Evening, Morning, Sinigang):

 

Rain

Like quarters,
the rain jingles
on the roof
of your home.

Each drop
slips into
the cracks
of your mind.

Water flows,
leaks through
the broken gutters
of your being. 

 

 * * *

 

Untitled lines from Mga Madaling-araw sa 7-Eleven (Early Mornings at 7-Eleven):  

 

The clock slowly nibbles
on the bread of opportunities.

 

 * * *

I entered the last one in Microsoft Copilot. The AI runs wild with it.

 

 

Days of 1521

Rajah Versus Conquistador by Kahlil Corazo (Pagecraft, 2025)

 

Blood Compact Reimagined (2020) by Herbert S. Pinpino, oil on canvas (Source)

 

The rajah was Rajah Humabon, the conquistador was Ferdinand Magellan. The versus was their fateful encounter in 1521 Cebu when the Spanish and precolonial Philippine cultures went on a collision course. It was a consequential time that would define the culture and history of a country-in-the-making. 

The historical novel was written by Kahlil Corazo who assembled a rich tapestry of historical details and steeped his scenes with cultural specifics of 16th century pre-Hispanic Philippine society. His fiction was a well-conceived story of an early power struggle between a native leader of Cebu and a visiting conqueror from halfway around the world. The story unfolded in switching registers of diplomacy and war, from psychological warfare to bloody combat, dramatizing what one character called the "complex machinery of statecraft". 

And what a feasible story it was, a narrative grounded in human nature and game theory, borrowing from the tactical strategies of chess and the "prisoner's dilemma" situation. Hovering between the two diametrically opposed characters were two conflicting customs and rites, representing two approaches of political science, that of the binukot's and the baylan's. Humabon's wives, Paraluman and Pilapil, were the proponents of the two forms of power.

"[T]he baylan must control the sacrifice," you explain, your voice carrying absolute certainty. "They understand that the Bakunawa's hunger cannot be denied, but it can be directed. Through their wisdom, the king's power becomes sacred rather than merely brutal. They transform random slaughter into holy ritual."

In contrast to the impulsiveness and violent human offerings of the baylan, the binukot way of seeing things through was a calm and calculated political strategy. Tutored by two strong women in the two ancient ways of sisterhood, Rajah Humabon possessed the two gifts (or skill sets) in his own being. It split his personality and marked him as an exemplar of both statecraft and statesmanship. His legacy as a leader would depend on how he would deal with the Spanish galleons at his doorstep. 

It was the year 1521. An armada of three Spanish ships arrived, captained by a Portuguese. Magellan was a conflicted historical character to be reckoned with. In the background, the hyperbolic figure of Lapulapu, almost stereotypical in his war freak mentality and outsized physique, sword-wielding and ready to enter into any transactions that involved spilling blood. Amid the direct confrontation between the animist beliefs of the rajah and the Christian virtues of the conquistador, the people of Sugbo were faced with an unusual choice: to be modernized by new Christian beliefs on charity and forgiveness and love or to sustain the old rituals that demanded sacrifices of human beings (slaves) to appease the old gods. 

The literary, cinematic, and pop culture recreation of 1521 was never lacking, almost always centering on the Battle of Mactan, with Magellan dying into the hands of the fierce warrior Lapulapu. Novels that tackled the subject include Viajero (1993) by F. Sionil José, Longitude (1998) by Carlos (1998), Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan (1938) by Stefan Zweig (translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul), and  Lapulapu: The Conqueror of Magellan (1938) by Vicente Gullas (translated from Cebuano by Erlinda K. Alburo).

The Western perspective of the encounter was perfectly captured by Stefan Zweig in his novel Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan (also published in a switched title, Magellan: Conqueror of the Seas). Zweig's historical novel was one-sided. His was an arguably romantic, colonialist, and racist account of the first circumnavigation of the world. His motive for writing the novel was driven by a dubious and condescending shame, trickling from the arrogance of comfort and elitism. On the other hand, the novel by Gullas, prefaced by a long critical essay by Resil B. Mojares, was a wide-eyed, cartoonish account of Lapulapu's heroics. (For context on why Zweig's novel left a bad taste in my mouth, see this post: Stefan Zweig's shame.)  

Lapu-Lapu by Francisco V. Coching (Images from Unang Labas, Klasika Pelikula)

In the realm of cinema or literature, there was no dearth of Lapulapu extolment. The vintage film Lapu-Lapu (1955, directed by Lamberto V. Avellana) was an adaptation from Francisco V. Coching's serial graphic novel. It was an amusing watch (watch it in Vimeo) despite the one-dimensional and stereotypical characters and the heavy nationalist slant. After an extended Battle of Mactan scene at the movie's climax, with the surviving Spanish soldiers scrambling for safety and retreating to their ship, it ended with a stirring speech from the Mactan warrior, played by Mario Montenegro. The native islanders crossed ranks with Lapulapu as he lashed out at the foreign invaders, in a voice very close to breaking point, while in the background played the music of the national anthem, composed in 1898.

Another movie, Lapu-Lapu (2002, directed by William G. Mayo) was top-billed by Senator Lito Lapid. I've watched snippets from this movie; the less said about it, the better. The miniseries Boundless (directed by Simon West, trailer), starring Rodrigo Santoro as Magellan and Álvaro Morte as Juan Sebastián Elcano, appeared in 2022. Like Zweig's narrative, it dramatized the perils and human folly of circumnavigating the globe. Add to this roster of visual propaganda the film 1521 (directed by Michael Copon, 2023, trailer). Its English speaking cast of characters included Danny Trejo as Magellan and Michael Copon as Lapulapu. 

Earlier this year, slow cinema auteur Lav Diaz edited and released the Gael García Bernal–starrer Magellan in Cannes (teaser). It was a 2.5-hour movie, culled from a projected nine-hour director's cut. Lav Diaz shared in interviews that, based on his years of research, he came to the conclusion that Lapulapu was not a historical figure, that he was just a mere invention of Rajah Humabon. (The things a researcher unearths or thinks he unearthed when there's nothing to unearth.)

Gael García Bernal in Magellan (2025, directed by Lav Diaz). Photo by: Hazel Orencio (The POST)

The "primary source" of all these historical intrigues was the written account of Pigafetta, the scribe who put to paper his observations, and perhaps Enrique too, the translator who bridged the communication between the Spaniards and the pre-Filipinos. Who could say a version of history was revisionist if in the first place the original speaker and the original writer already colored their subjective accounts with their own biases?

An alternative to these dubious literary and cinematic versions of history was Rajah Versus Conquistador, Kahlil Corazo's first novel, no less biased perhaps for its own chosen historical slant. It differed in many respects to the Magellan-Humabon-Lapulapu fictional accounts and historiography.

Kahlil Corazo took on the two viewpoints: the native rajah's and the Portuguese conqueror's. He even had the gumption to use the second-person point of view in the two alternating narratives of his larger-than-life characters. Corazo bared the psychology behind his characters' thoughts and actions, rooted in behavioral and political sciences. 

He focused on the dueling psyches or split personalities of Humabon, as well as on Magellan's missionary zealotry and self-delusion. The novelist's delineation of the thought processes of the two characters propelled the logic of his story. The good thing is that novel did not have the bombast and purple prose of Zweig, and it did attempt a balanced perspective where each character was given equal chance to tell their side of history. 

Also a far cry from Zweig's colonialist and elitist viewpoint and stereotypical portrait of the ignoble savage, Corazo's retelling of events in the first half of 1521 was no less savage in its neo-animist perspective, which rather made for a postcolonial treatment of history. Where Zweig manifested the figure of Lapulapu as "a ludicrous human insect", Corazo's image of Lapulapu, from the point of view of Magellan, was no less reductive.

Though the Kapitan cannot understand Lapulapu's words, something primal in him responds to the warrior's presence. Like a deer at a river's edge sensing a crocodile beneath the still waters, his body tenses almost imperceptibly. You see how he straightens in his white garments, as if the purity of his cloth could shield him against this tattooed giant who moves with the deceptive calm of an ancient predator. Even through your fear, you recognize that instinctive reaction – the moment when one hunter realizes he has become prey. 

Whether a "crocodile beneath the still waters" or "tattooed giant who moves with the deceptive calm of an ancient predator", Lapulapu was still every inch the image of a stereotypical warrior-hero, but the novelist had at least imbued his tragic and simple figure with all-too-human vindictiveness and comic possibilities. In fact, the three major characters in this passion play – Magellan, Humabon, and Lapulapu – were all tragicomic figures. The novelist was not after historical facts, he was going after psychological nuance and political ideas.

Final insight: the true circumnavigation is not of the world but of the soul, returning at last to its Creator, having learned what could only be taught through the journey itself.   

Corazo's research went a long way to dramatize not only the human motivations but the political economy of pre-Hispanic Cebu, even offering a portrait of early free market capitalism which foreshadowed the unquenchable thirst of greed capitalism.

"There is one diwata emerging in our ports," Handuraw said as you walked. "The Hokkien merchants call it wealth, the Gujarati call it trade, but these are merely faces it wears, like masks at a ritual. The baylan call him Sapî. He grows alongside the old powers, feeding not on blood like the spirits of raid and war, but on desire itself." 

"Sapî grows stronger with each generation," Handuraw continued. "He feeds on the endless hunger for things from distant shores. The Hokkien bring porcelain, the Gujarati bring cloth, the Siamese bring gold – and with each trade, Sapî's power grows." 

It was more than just portraits of two leaders on opposite sides; it was a love letter to 16th century Sugbo (Cebu) society, an early imagining of a community of nation and a nation of community.

“Sugbo binds thousands to an idea,” she said. “This is a different kind of power, one that grows stronger rather than weaker as it spreads.” 

You saw how this force, this diwata called Sugbo, could grow beyond the limits of personal loyalty or physical coercion. A datu might command a hundred warriors through force of personality, but Sugbo could move thousands through pride of belonging. 

The implications staggered you. If what Handuraw said was true, then the real power of a port lay not just in its weapons or wealth, but in its ability to capture the imagination of its people. Every feast you hosted, every display of prosperity and strength, every act of justice or generosity that enhanced Sugbo’s reputation— these were not just tools of power but offerings to this new kind of diwata.

The Rajah Humabon side of history was here no longer an untold, shameful "side story" deliberately skirted around in Philippine historical narratives. It was here front and center in all its moral ambiguities and historical ramifications. The reckoning of history was often always a reckoning of inconvenient trickery and massacres. While Humabon was treated as a secondary figure in the charade of history, Corazo gave him a distinctive voice, someone who occupied in fact a focal role in history, who himself made history. 

Corazo also interwove in his story the previously hidden feminist aspects of culture and history. He showed how women were active participants in/of historical destinies. In a "fictional" afterword, the novelist talked about the theme of the novel: the gendered nature of power.

We also hope this translation offers Western readers a glimpse into how history looks when viewed not from the deck of a Spanish galleon but from behind the woven walls of a payag, where women who never appeared in colonial chronicles nevertheless shaped the course of events through their influence on powerful men and their own direct wielding of power. 

The undercurrents of politics were the novel's golden currency. Rich with ideas on politics and cunning, tactical prowess in war and diplomacy, the slow burning decision map inside Humabon's head followed the branching of chess moves and countermoves. 

"Four virtues," you [Humabon] muse, "and not one for cunning." 

* * * 

You've learned from Handuraw that true power grows in the spaces between order and chaos. The serpent within you writhes in anticipation of how this foreign faith might crack open the rigid structures of your society. Like a lover's touch that begins gentle but promises exquisite passion, these small disruptions will spread through your domain, creating delicious new possibilities for those who know how to ride the storm. Just as Handuraw taught you to savor the moment when katsubong first enters the blood – that sweet instant between wholeness and corruption – you understand that true power flows from controlled transgression. Each small disorder you introduce only makes your eventual dominion stronger, more complete. 

The leadership of Rajah Humabon was Machiavellian. His cunning was directed not only toward self-preservation but for the prosperity and persistence of Sugbo in history. His complexity emanated from his sincere attempts to control naked power using his two skill sets, to move the chess pieces around him of their own accord. He deployed his tactics through statecraft and delicious cunning and deception. 

Filmmakers and novelists had projected a lot of things on the characters of history, including their own colonialist biases and colored prejudices. They had been misguided in depicting (and we had been inept in understanding) the "other", favoring the truths of their own culture and civilization because their comfort zone could no longer imagine beyond their second nature and primal urges. They could no longer look beyond their own points of view. And we had consumed a lot of history appropriated and distorted in various permutations.

In Rajah Versus Conquistador, Corazo delivered a nuanced interpretation of history: heady, inspired, and feasible. It was a compelling version and vision of 1521, a provocative addendum to the national imaginary. In it, the characters interact not wholly in words but in body language. Every gesture was of fatal import, and power wore the skin of a chameleon before rearing its timeless hydra head. The novel was a refreshing counterpoint to the hagiographic and colonialist biographies and films of Magellan or the nationalist myth-rendering of Lapulapu in many misdirected novels and films about him. 

"The most effective lies are those wrapped around a core of truth", wrote Corazo in the novel. Perhaps only the untethered imagination of fiction, and fiction of imagination, could allow us to view historical events with a grain of truth. Corazo's recovery of Humabon through fiction was a recovery of a lost point of view.

Restoration of Rajah Humabon statue in Cebu (Image from SunStar Cebu)