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hidden lineal connections can be traced back to the dream-like
origins of the Spanish Catholic domination. The novel consists of
three sections: “The Book of Acts” features the three characters
and the different roles they play in the terrorist reign of the
Marcos military government; “The Book of Numbers” is set in a
mythical time and space of the beginning of colonialism when their
common ancestor, a Spanish Capuchin monk, sexually coerces a
number of local women and fathers a number of offspring, with
Adrian, Anna and Eliza as the latest generation;
6
“The Book of
Revelation” switches back to the present time, focusing on the
three characters’ battle with the commander of the secret police,
Colonel Amor, and the uprising against the military dictatorship at
the peasant’s festival. In all periods of this complex historical
narrative, violence and violation against the bodies recur time and
again, not just as a historical background or political context
against which the characters must struggle, but as part of their
subject making and family lineages, rendering their everyday lives a
permanent “state of war.”
The novel introduces the ambiguous beginning of these family
sagas by invoking the primal scene of the encounter between a
Capuchin monk and a native Malayan girl, in a mythical, dreamy
6
“The Book of Numbers” focuses on four generations of the Villaverde family,
giving detailed account of the encounter between Maya
—
the matriarch of
the Villaverde family
—
and the friar, the establishment of a prospering
brewery in Manila by Maya and her son Carlos Lucas during the Spanish
colonization and its dissolution in the times of US imperial conquest at the
turn of the century. Another mother-son story follows suit between Mayang,
Carlos Lucas’s wife, and her son Lois Carlos, against the background of War
World II. Lois Carlos is born of an extra marital relationship between
Mayang and Carlos Lucas’s German business partner Hans Zangroniz. The
Book also provides the childhood story of Anna, Lois Carlos’s daughter, thus
depicting a complete lineage of the de Villaverde family. Adrian is a
descendent of the Capuchin monk with another native woman. Eliza is the
granddaughter of Hans Zangroniz, who changes his name to Chris Hansen
after fleeing to the South. To compare with the delineation of the Villaverde
family, Adrian’s and Eliza’s family histories are either hinted with fragments
or painted with broad strokes.