The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

fortune. So Papá came out looking unbalanced, brain-heavy, and at first he wasn’t named in case he died. Then they named him after his Papá, the old soldier, and his great-uncle Jorge Luis, a bagpiper from the Basque mountains. Papá grew up handsome, broad-shouldered, and wild. He had a katsila nose—too big for his fine features, much admired. He was generous, impatient, and a good mimic, like his great-uncle Jorge Luis, a clown who stowed away with swine and pineapples on a caravel. Papá had a way with languages. When he went off to Manila, he came home with prizes—for extemporaneous speech, Latin, classical declamations. He was an interpreter, not a creator. (The poems he later gave my mother were other people’s odes, some written by his late great-uncle Jorge Luis, a poete maudit [“un poeta loko-loko” in original—Trans.] and perfumed dandy.) He fell in with a group at the university that dreamed of La Gloriosa, but that was also not original: it was The Liberal Age in Spain. The vogue was to hate the friars: it was only later that hate was necessary. My father, el genio Jote, liked giving speeches. He was good at it. He had a very good memory. Then he got expelled. So much for the liberal age, la gloriosa. God Bless Rey Alfonso! And Rajah Malitic and Lakandula! And my Great-Great-Uncle Jorge Luis, the vagabond of Jaca! At home, my father had nothing better to do but raise a storm. That’s how Papá discovered the holiday plays.” (Trans. Note)

115 Here lies Raymundo’s genius. This biographical nugget is in the wastebasket, not the entry: “if reality is in the seams, where does fantasy abide?” [Mürk, Queries for Ménårdsz at the Analytic Arboretum, Antibes, 1967]. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Vence, France)

Entry #7

This story, of the Gentleman from La Mancha, comes back to me in parts. Mamá played Dulc. I could have been three. Very pretty, in the green dress. She couldn’t walk anymore, but she was the most beautiful woman in the world. They sat her in a chair on stage, a movable butaka. Papá was the Gentleman. The plot comes back in bits and pieces as I keep reading. It’s not much fun to read if you already know the ending. Dulcinea fans herself to death. That’s what it looked from backstage, where I watched Mamá. Papá on a bed, shouting with dignity: “Burn the books of my foolish youth, oh ye of good faith!” Something like that. Props (patched-up porcelain bowls, faded embroidery on shawls), open-air mosquito stages in dirt plazas, a fly circling the ugly fruit of a jackfruit tree116 117 118

116 Langaw lumalaway sa langka: feeble English fails to assimilate the lyrical nature of this fetid matter. Sorry. (Trans. Note)

117 The Mata family declares that Raymundo’s mother died in childbirth. “He killed his mommy; that’s why he was nuts” is the prevailing wisdom among that warped, typically Caviteño clan. The passage belies their claim: Raymundo remembers traveling with his player-parents until the age of three, at which time his actress-mother died of tuberculosis. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)

118 This entry had many crossed-out lines, and I append them as #8, next page. (Trans. Note)

Entry #8

(lines crossed out and/or heavily edited from #7)

[series of crossed-out details about mother’s eyes, punctuating fairly random sections of #7]119 120 121 122 “People remember her eyes . . .Their strange haunted look still follows me around. They were gray: color of rocks at low tide . . . They devoured her face, took up space in people’s memory . . . Must have been the first thing I saw—her eyes in pain, distended. [series of morbid statements] An awful thing to begin life knowing you are hurting another . . . Her blood. I see her blood . . . She washed her handkerchiefs herself when we were traveling. I thought all women breathed blood . . . [childish notions of gender] Boys and girls had differences . . . Mamá had milk, Papá had mustache; Mamá had blood, Papá had tears . . . Mamá coughed blood from her mouth . . . blood poured from her tummy . . . Papá

cried and cried from his nostrils and his eyes . . . There are pros and cons, and I can’t tell who I want to be.”123 124 125

119 Phrases in brackets are my own condensation of writer’s main topics in this section. (Trans. Note)

120 “Condensation” is a fine term, Mimi C. This bracketed section, The Dream of Mother’s Blood, is perhaps the most significant of the documents presented so far. The unconscious makes signal moves in the kid’s elisions. Does the boy erase what he does not wish to confront—his mother’s slow death and his perceived role in her dying? In any case, my heart goes out to Raymundo. Not to contradict my esteemed colleague, but the Mata family members may be correct: Raymundo’s mother died in childbirth. Note the hallucinatory “blood [pouring] from her tummy.” He had psychotic visions, watching her as Dulcinea to his father’s Don Quixote, etc. It is likely that at that point in time, she was already dead! (It does not really matter if he did or did not watch her as Dulcinea: what’s vital is that this image recurs, a misplaced recollection.) The above elisions—ghostwords—tell us more about the boy’s state of mind than any other matter in the journals thus far. If that ruthless proverb is true, that “it is the world of words that creates the world of things,” then what ghostworlds do erased words create? And do we really want to know? (Dr. Diwata Drake, Salamanca, Spain)

121 Do we really want to know? (Trans. Note)

122 I am pulling out my nose hair, tearing out my earwax, at the insane insinuations of that salamanquera, Dr. Diwata (Man)Drake—are you on drugs? You’re the psycho! Why can’t you let him be, life and legend as we make it, and not muddy