The more vehement critics, those who man the barricades of truth, a numerous tribe, curse the renegade Rizalists and say: pwe! The mere notion that the text can in any way be attributed to the noble and long-suffering poet sickens these scholars.
The travesty is Raymundo Mata’s alone, they chorus: he has desecrated and appropriated Rizal beyond forbearance. The “loop” in Entry #46 is brazen proof of Raymundo Mata’s horrible sacrilege, his tampering and revision of a holy text. He dares to enlace his own words—interpolate his vile witticisms—with Jose Rizal’s! Que verguenza, not to mention barbaridad. It means nothing to these scholars that in doing so Raymundo Mata the thief, that Barabbas, recovered the lost novel and, however feloniously, resurrected the hero. That last fact only adds to Raymundo’s errors.
To these diocesan faithful, this text commits a crime punishable by death (in any case, Raymundo Mata seems to have vanished in time, derelict and hallucinating, water-tortured but somehow sublime, in that cell in Bilibid, under the custody of American G.I.s, so that takes care of that). To these fastidious readers, this memoir, this fantasy, is cousin to all other vibrant forgeries and textual ambiguities that have plagued this fervid democracy’s highly imaginative history: e.g., the sadistic delusions of the prehispanic Code of Kalantiaw, a bunch of bark documents wrapped in wax, written in cuttlefish ink, and stuffed in the horn of a six-legged bull; the laborious stenography of the Minutes of the Katipunan, cursed by an over-earnest, too-detailed banality; the ignoble contretemps over the ignominious so-called Retraction of Rizal, in which the hero allegedly confesses in his last hour his return to God, like some poor modern Chaucer—a spurious document perpetrated (so the scholars say) by no less than the Archbishop of Manila and the head of the Jesuit order; Aguinaldo’s apocryphal writ commuting the death sentence of Bonifacio, smacking more of wish-fulfilment than fact; and the still-disputed translation by Bonifacio of Rizal’s posthumous poem found in a lamp, Mi Ultimo Adios (but anyway, they add, who cares—what matters is that the translation was memorized, word for word, and gave the rebels heart).
The list of textual deceptions underlines without a doubt the eternal trauma of the Philippines: like everyone else, it is a contingent being, born of words.
And it soothes none that their own flagrant sense of self is perhaps recast in the miracle of Raymundo’s language, in the strange way that words conversely enact magic tricks of being.
But as for me, I have no wish to deny Raymundo’s story.
Indeed, I prefer to give him ballast.
I hope, I fervently desire, to give witness to his truth.
I know. I know.
You know.
That there is a shadow on my cheek, a wisp of a pinch and a palm on the face, along with the breeze of the beach (in Antibes) that perhaps surges with this desire—
I admit my own personal regret: the way I failed to follow my folly, my love, Pedro Ménårdsz, who prophecied as he escaped with his minions from the just wrath of Claro Mürk—
It is the world of words that desires the world of things.
As I said, I have combed through The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, I have retraced and retrod and gone through clues like Edgar Allan Poe’s Prefect G— (to recall the allusions of Mata himself).
I have come to some troubling conclusions.
Among my (hundreds of) clues are the following, to wit: the use of English in Entry #36; the names lifted from Rizal’s student diary in Entry #19; the entire section on Lady K in Entry #22; a mysterious signal of textual finality, consummatum est, in the middle of narration in Entry #23; and the faithful translation into English (from the Spanish) of fol. 57 of Makamisa, as found in Entry #46. There is one interesting, provocative statement, a line in Entry #21, in which the hero cryptically declares: I enjoyed the act of copying; but in that case I may be overreading. (I’m not even going to mention the soup of other texts that indelibly stained this memoir, from balagtasan to bugtong—all of which otherwise sustain the Filipino soul.)
Each of these clues shares a linguistic deviltry, an almost incandescent reflexive trickery—the kind perpetrated by agile liars, or translators.
I wish to call on the single witness of the actual text—the sole reader of the so-called original papers of the memoir: the Translator.
Mimi C.—where are you?
As our correspondence reached a climax, I tried calling upon her in person, Googling her address and phone number, but in vain. Has she fled the country? The publisher Trina Trono keeps her itinerary under wraps, stalls whenever I try to get at least her cell so I can text her, and now refuses to return my calls (and then my server keeps sending back “undeliverable mail”); all this even as Trina Trono graciously extends full support for this publication—since pretty soon she can pocket its modest profits.
The translator’s hoax—yes, I use the word boldly, Mimi C., wherever you are—only stokes the fires of a cruel illusion:
That a nation so conceived, from the existential exigencies of a young man’s first novel, will find redemption in the phoenix of his lost words.
And if so her enterprise preserves the country’s painful paradox: it is full of writers who believe a text will save it, even when they know barely anyone will read it. (Perhaps this explains her effrontery.)
And so I demand in the name of Raymundo Mata: habeas corpus.
Give us the body.
It is the Translator, Mimi C., alone who can answer the questions of the critics. Where
