Leaning out the balcony above the little arbor filled with flowerpots and hanging trellises of disparate forms, Cecilia wished to distract her thoughts from the apprehension of the Curate’s voice: again, she looked upon the flowers—but now their freshness only reminded her that they were destined to be raised to praise the priest at the Lenten mass.
—Tuktukan!
Down below she heard the cries of the town of Pili, from the galleries and playgrounds the mob cries of men in duels marked the time of fiesta. While the fathers played with their fortune in the cockpits, the sons with a sense of admirable proportion played with eggs. The only difference was that in the cockfight, the disgraced lost money, while in the childish battle of eggs the winner gained absolute power over the vanquished. She reflected: this follows history, as Darwin noted. In infant nations, the weak become slaves; while among older systems, the loser only pays her fine, and each citizen has control even over her corpse: such logic is the law of nature.528 529
[This lay upside down in folder, typed:]
Everytime he began printing, the product seemed unutterably strange. And even as, at his feet, he contemplated the work he had already done, a thickening bulk that seemed at times autobiographical and sometimes fanciful, and at some points historical and factual, though admittedly partial (and then maybe to some degree hysterical, not in the meaning of comedy but of pathology, but then, he hoped, not indubitably so), he couldn’t help reading it as if it were the first time.
And then the oracular machine, which sideways looked (he thought) like a Cyclops’s eye, a one-wheeled wonder of Ysagani’s mechanical times, scrawled out the next page:
love my father’s yellow stream buttnaked green coconut open to surprise cuckoldroaches-dancing-in-a-cone Porkrind-Chronicles saltweep of fish Emilia Christmas lights Padre Mariano Gomez (r.i.p.) my gonads! indios Jorge Raymundo Mata scabs lanzones deeply ripe mangoes navel-orange thighs
[end of Raymundo Mata’s papers]
526 My flesh moves toward twilight, or is it a kaingin shadow, and I note a few odd details, amid my hallucinations: Cecilia and Ysagani, the couple in Makamisa, she of the unimaginable wealth and he—well, so it is said Rizal never finished that novel, if one might call those fragments a book, and in fact couldn’t decide on the couple’s names (he sometimes called Cecilia Marcela, and Ysagani Crispin) and before we could foretell any part of that young nephew of a curate’s fate, the story ends in blurry aporia—a nimbus of truncated folios, erasures, abandoned revisions. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
527 Dear Mimi C., before I regress into my astasic inertia: enclosed herewith is Rizal’s third novel, Makamisa (after the Mass, as one might say in English), a mix of Tagalog and Spanish, rediscovered in parts and translated—by a Benedictine—or was it Augustinian—my memory’s failing—anyway, some scholar in monkish garb. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
528 I’m reading through the text Estrella Espejo offered me. I read here this passage from Brother Ambeth Ocampo’s careful transmission of Makamisa, which the Benedictine monk believes was the last in the trilogy of Rizal’s novels. The following is from fol. 70, the original version in Rizal’s hand and “discovered” by the monk in 1986 in a mislabeled folder in the National Library: “. . . La unica diferencia era que en la lucha de gallos el desgraciado perdia su dinero, mientras que en la lucha de los huevos el vencido pasaba a poder del vencedor. Cuestion de historia como diria Darwin: en la infancia de los [naciones la] pueblos el debil [era] pasaba a ser esclavo; entre las naciones viejas se paga la indemnizacion y cada uno se queda con sus cadaveres: la logica es la ley de la naturaleza.” Mimi C.—what do you think? May I have your cell phone number? Let’s talk. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines)
529 There is indeed resemblance between Rizal’s Spanish and Raymundo Mata’s English. Though one might attribute the modern allusion to Darwin to the latter text, it’s clear here that the long-entombed and antique Rizal was the original modernist. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
Afterword
By Estrella Espejo
I would like to express my gratitude to Raymundo Mata and his heirs. It’s a miracle—I mean, a miracle happened to me. Capital M! If you recall, there I was, falling into necrotic sleep and inertia, a familiar nightmare when I contemplate the history of my country. My spleen was twitching beneath my ribcage like a poisoned bantam chicken, and I was swooning into horror. My ganglia and gorge, my nerves and nasal hoar—I was shaking toward that fatal torpor, a malaise I know so well—not just of the body, but of desire, of memory and mind.
Oh country, oh fate!
When suddenly apprehension broke, like a fever.
What I apprehended was this: it was the voice of History.
It spoke.
I swear it was him, Raymundo Mata, a trembling lisp of a nation’s desire. Arise, Estrella Espejo, he said as I lay prone in my bed, breathing through a plastic apparatus. You hold in your hand the mirror of your race. (To be honest, maybe he said “face,” I could barely hear through the inhaler, and my ear, stricken with the same old abysmal abasia, long-dormant, still has
