47 “Buta ka, buta!” Or did he say batuta ka, phallic symbol, meaning You are a police baton, a guarda civil’s tool? Butaka, I know, is a rocking chair. I failed to translate. (Trans. Query)
48 You are blind. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
49 Pardon? (Trans. Query)
50 Buta ka means: you are blind. In Waray. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
51 Curiously, in an episode not noted in these memoirs, the Caviteño Idoy, a.k.a. Candido Tria Tirona, died “under a sampaloc tree” [Calairo, Emmanuel, Cavite El Viejo, 133] attacked by Spaniards while he was “resting” [ibid.] after the bloody Battle of Binakayan. For this mortal disruption of his siesta, Idoy is called The Martyr of Binakayan. In revolutionary memoirs, “resting” was the second most common trope. (“Marching bands” is the fourth; “pintakasi,” special cockfights, runs a strong third.) Blood is barely mentioned. Spanish officers “rested,” troops “rested,” page after page is filled with “resting.” Not a single memoirist talks much about the experience of killing; but all talk about “rest.” The foregrounding of this pastoral scene mirrors the fantastic resting that lines revolutionary memoirs like hemp, as if events proceeded in narcotic haze. What is repressed? Death. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Redwood, California)
52 Dr. Voodoo, why talk of blood when it has not yet been shed? Isn’t it enough that one breathes through hoary tubes and has wires in the heart, and that the body performs its dance of vapors beyond the soul’s consent? Why destroy peace? The boys are sunbathing by the river: let them be. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
53 The pun on shit and suit is mine, but it matches the vulgarity of the original. Kitchen Spanish, as Rizal called Cavite’s chavacano (rough or vulgar) speech. Neither Spanish nor Tagalog. If I were to translate word for word Raymundo Mata’s language in these early passages, the reader would give up in despair. My facsimile of his playfulness possesses my errors, but I retain his allusiveness, his shifts in tone, and the somewhat lunatic energy of his observations, not to mention his puns. With at least three languages at every Filipino’s disposal, Raymundo Mata can pun at least seven ways in one phrase. That’s simple math. Thus far, I count five languages in the diary—Spanish, Latin, Tagalog, Waray, and Cavite-Chabacano. (Trans. Note)
54 In a letter to Ferdinand Blumentritt, his sedate Austrian mentor, Rizal did not seem to have much faith in the mixed-up vocabulary of the people of Cavite. Evidence of Rizal’s views of language rests on his correspondence with the Austrian (I discount for the moment the views in the Fili, being fiction). No one knows what kept the ethnologist Blumentritt at home. A sensitive malade imaginaire, he failed to meet Rizal anywhere in the hero’s mad dash around Europe in the 1880s: they met only once, in Blumentritt’s Austro-Hungarian Bohemia. Despite their heartrending bond, the friends spent only forty-eight hours, max, in each other’s company—and so it seems we have the European’s hypochondria to thank for the copious, homoerotic correspondence that survives. In one of those endless letters, Rizal made a matter-of-fact list of Filipino languages to satisfy Blumentritt’s scholarly questions. Next to Cavite, Rizal simply noted: español de cocina. (Trans. Note)
55 Homoerotic? Shame on you, Mimi C.! Just because you have the power of the pen in the modern age does not mean every word is a phallic orgy. Friendships between men in the nineteenth century produced affectionate, loving, fond epistles of, well, gayness, but that does not mean they were gay! May Rizal’s heterosexual hex vex you from Banahaw! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
56 Mimi C. did not say Rizal was gay. She said the letters were homoerotic. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Berlin, Germany)
57 Same difference. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
58 This trope, Filipino Spanish-ism for underpants (calzoncillos), recurs in the memoir. Filipinos liberally fucked with Spanish words: metonym, metathesis, etc. etc. (Trans. Note)
59 I used to put on my grandfather’s old pants just for fun; then my mom beat me up for my “wild ways.” Una jovencita varonil. I was a disgrace. One summer, my brothers wore odd loose trousers without buttons, we also called them karsonsilyos, when they turned twelve, special dispensation for their late circumcisions. They paraded their swathed, tortured bodies as if they were Cassius Clay or something, and I envied their loutish look—their rite of passage with their weird pants. On the other hand, they did look like a bunch of circus animals on display, strutting around town in their underwear, not indecent, but sad. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
60 If he got this orgasmic about buttons, what would he have done with zippers? “The anal stage” is a lurid misconception. Crude terminology based on finite contingencies (i.e., the human body) brought psychoanalytic thought to an impasse. We now understand that Freud’s theories are sound, but his words were disgusting. Raymundo here is in what has been pejoratively referred to by prurient, ignorant, non-Mürkian analysts as an anal crisis but which we in the twenty-first century realize is just one in a healthy continuum of linked, random, and eternal neuroses. “What are the three facts of the human condition?” an interviewer once asked Mürk in a Helsinki spa, where he spent time in the aftermath of that fateful Antibes Plenary of 1977. “I have three words for you,” the savant replied in the languor of Finnish sulfur, a tanned and floating oracle: “Neurosis. Neurosis. Neurosis.” (Dr. Diwata Drake, Bali, Indonesia)
61 The statement indicates that what follows (“Bird . . . really really free”) was set to music, perhaps a nursery rhyme. Many words were indecipherable; they seem smeared with some offal; plus,
