(In my case, I will always recall with affection the image of the budding larcenist meditating on that flat rock in this memoir’s pages: the memoirist’s haunting solitude as he gazed down on the ocean’s blank page.)
Nowhere in the recollections of the hero’s family or of the wise men of Dapitan does it appear that Rizal worked again at the kiosk after the death of his child. There lay undisturbed the twin ghosts of his genius. The hero’s numerous letters, postcards, and other ephemera ascertain that he never discovered, or at least spoke of, the manuscript’s loss. And so it is that the Philippines owes to the perfidy of that nightblind thief Raymundo Mata the preservation of what one might call a limb of its patrimony—or maybe some other organ: a distorted lens, a partial eye.
The actual state of the hero’s manuscript—as preserved here in a circular loop, with same beginning and no end, in bits and unfettered pieces, promiscuous and confusing, an omnivorous mad shedding of words, as of some kind of ecdysiast eccentric taking off all her clothes without much ado—is not for me, a mere historian, to evaluate. I leave that to literary upholsterers and cultural quacks: those critics and amateur hypnotists whose words must inevitably follow.
An Epitaph
By Dr. Diwata Drake
Excuse me for my long silence.
I was reading.
I have been re-reading The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. I encourage you all to do the same. Sure, the beginning is a tatter of mangled texts, all of which one could skip without anxiety (although I daresay without them the rest would not exist). And then there’s the matter of the leaning tower of commentary, so that the document seems not one but two—or who knows three: one a waspish intertext of witches, another a disarmed combatant’s confession of misadventure, and yet another (the most revolutionary document of them all, perhaps) the abominable pulsing void in which the intramural wrangling and all that awful mess, the pasticciaccio brutto of voices, intersect and must converge.
But one clue among the excursions of the translator, Ms. Mimi C., led me on a chase, and in the last few weeks I’ve had to drop the usual effusions of theory, and even praxis. My own unfinished work, now titled, Why, You Lovely Symptoms: The Structure of the Filipino Unconscious, Not Really Lang(ue), or Even a Parol(e), has been abandoned.
I’ve worked as a detective.
I found a few wild geese, a bronze, or at least mestizo-type golden fleece, and some cut-up kusing, plus one centavo. In short, I’ve picked up stray cues (or should I use a fishy metaphor instead?) from the trail of little red herring left by this monumental paean to History, as my esteemed colleague Professor Estrella Espejo puts it.
The fossil evidence of Raymundo’s words, especially the conclusive Entry #46, seems to indicate a curious interlacing of the blind hero’s memoir with the ophthalmologist’s third novel. It is as if the doctor-savior and patient-crook were looped (Estrella’s words, not mine), tangled in knots of each other.
I congratulate Estrella on her reprieve from history: I hope it lasts. However, Estrella accepts the ghostly state of the text with too much goodwill (I only hope the voice she heard was figurative).
In her last passage, she seems to concede, without directly saying so, that Raymundo’s memoir and the hero’s third novel are one.
Without questioning at all the oddness of her point, its vertiginous trap, she . . . accepts that Raymundo, that ecdysiast eccentric, has taken on the emperor’s clothes, so to speak—and thus Rizal’s naked bones, that is, his sentences, lie like a dark fitted overcoat upon Raymundo’s memoir, a circular loop, with same beginning and no end.
She does not bother to disentangle one from the other.
Various scholars have already argued the pros and cons of the two conclusions that instantly arose when advance copies of this text were indiscriminately mailed out by an anonymous crank (I had nothing to do with it). I shall not go into the ideological specifics of the scholars’ tirades but will gloss on a few points.
One: certain renegade Rizalists, alleged escapees from Mount Banahaw, argue that the “loop” in Entry #46 tells us this—Raymundo Mata of Kawit’s memoir is part of the lost third novel of the hero, as told in the Minerva press sheets rolled out by the young curate’s nephew, Ysagani. To these devout and balding apostates, Raymundo Mata’s memoir is a text within Rizal’s recently discovered novel Makamisa, or After the Mass.
One of these escaped Rizalists, perhaps driven a bit deranged by his own lost years on the mountain, has gone so far as to declare: the memoir is the lost third novel.
If so, Rizal in his last days turns out to be a sore parodist; ventriloquist to a purloiner and, perhaps, a rapist but also, oddly, a rampant plagiarist of himself; clearly a heretic against his Jesuit God; and a bit inattentive when it comes to plot. This rather modern Rizal, I must say, has his admirers, among them a coterie from Queens, New York, who lists a number of “postcursors” of Rizal, such as the hero of the Frenchman Raymond Queneau’s The Blue Flowers, and one sentence in a paragraph about bat wings in a story by the late symbolist Franz Arcellana.
The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is seductive because it implies resurrection, which is a desire that unites all humans, even those who are not Filipinos. Somehow in this memoir a lost novel rises from its grave, and with it its author. The execution of Rizal by the Spaniards (curiously omitted from Raymundo’s plot530), the eternity of the hero’s pathos and injustice, has perpetrated all too many deceits and delusions in his countrymen—and I am not just referring to the sectarians of Banahaw, although they are a special case.
The many seances and tableaux calling up the ghost of Rizal are innumerable in the Philippines, his child-republic, which seems to exist only
