126 The hero’s early identification with the conservative, God-fearing uncle is typical of a child’s sentimental progress—later, Raymundo’s shift from devout nephew to agnostic radical is not so different from modern-day Manila teenagers, who might wake up Opus Dei one morning and turn Maoist by nightfall, give or take a few strolls along EDSA. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
127 After the Cavite Mutiny, suspected subversives (filibusteros) were under surveillance, but life became normal. For instance, future Katipunan general Don Mariano Alvarez, implicated in the Mutiny, became town mayor of Noveleta (his son Santiago became Raymundo’s pal at the Latinidad de Jose Basa). Don Jose Basa, once exiled to Guam, returned to establish a famous private school of (lame) secondary education. Don Jorge Raymundo Mata, a.k.a. el genio Jote, the hero’s father, was hunted down because he was one of Burgos’s compares, part of his barkada, so to speak—the Guardia Civil being unaware that he was really only a bad dramatist. After the Mutiny, el genio Jote never returned to Kawit. It’s said that he remained incognito in the mountains of Maragondon, allegedly a lithe, cross-dressing bandit. All records—plus vicious rumor—seem to indicate, however, that his flight may have been—well—flighty, occasioned not by filibusterismo but cervantismo, romantic grief. But in the 1890s, the legend of the revolutionary bandit, el genio Jote, took on a certain glamor among Caviteños. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
128 As noted, a prominent rumor was that, to frame the genius Filipino canon Padre Burgos, scheming friars bribed another Filipino of Spanish descent to disguise himself as a priest in the hours leading to the revolt and so implicate native clergy as conspirators in the soldiers’ riot. The similarity to the plot of trumped-up conspiracy in Rizal’s novel, El Filibusterismo, is not coincidental; the “decoy episode” is also a favorite of fine fin-de-siecle melodramas, including my favorites, Sherlock Holmes mysteries and the anarchist novels of Eugène Sue. Raymundo categorically refutes that his uncle was that decoy Filipino priest of Spanish descent. The Mystery of the Cavite Mutiny’s Unknown Curate is unsolved to this day. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
129 Conspiracy theories, also known as outbreaks of paranoid-schizophrenia in the public realm, are symptoms of meltdown in a diseased society. Conspiracy theories abounded in both camps—Spaniards believed all filibusteros were evil Masons and native clergy were all subversives. Filipinos believed that every Spaniard was out to get them. Of course, the Spaniards were out to get them, but the fact that the substance of Filipino paranoia was true is not the point. The psychoanalytic historian’s concern is that the patient (colonial Filipino society) acquired an obsessive pathology, symptom of trauma. To cure it of paranoia’s lingering effects need not require rooting out paranoia itself (a symptom that may never go away, even when the direct cause, the Spaniards, are gone, which, of course, proves pathology) for “freedom is cognition in a cage” [Mürk, Exercises IV]. The cure is ceaseless analysis, which may simply be the burden of being alive. As for the paranoia of the tyrant: power is an illness not even constitutional amendments can cure. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Zurich, Switzerland)
130 Nonsense! The Philippines is not a patient, and you, Dr. Frankenstein, are no nurse. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
131 It’s true Burgos was a northerner: from Vigan, Ilocos Sur. But like Raymundo’s Tio U., Burgos was the son of a Spanish militiaman and a Filipina mestiza—one-eighth “Filipino,” if you want to be meticuloso about it. Burgos, a mestizo like the hero Raymundo Mata, literally threw in his lot with his motherland—his mother’s country. Something to think about. The rebellion of the mestizo world, as Filipinos call its hybrid society of mixed souls riven by colonizers—mulatto or Creole being alien phrases—marks the trauma of this revolt. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
132 On the other hand, hybridity is the violent lot of history. Cf., Frederick Douglass, or Homer A. Plessy. (Dr. Diwata Drake, New Orleans, LA)
Entry #10133
[ . . . She134 lured my father into her bastard world, that unseemly place—the dramatic stage. He became obsessed with mounting increasingly more ambitious plays. Not content with religious mysteries, my father dabbled in diabolical myths. One, about three witches who predict a regicide. Another, about daughters who abandon their father, a foolish king. In others—monsters created out of air by a bookish wizard; and fairies who fall in love with an ass.135 His realism was dangerous. People saw allegories in the smallest speech. When the old king raved in blind madness in the thunderstorm, the weeping audience saw their country betrayed; when the witches cackled about assassination, the audience cheered. In all of them, my mother’s delicate cough and tear-dimmed eyes, the stain marks of her talent, possessed their souls. She coughed artfully in all his fables, which grew so probable for everyone else that priests were ready to squash my parents’ brief career, but not without first demanding a free performance. No one noticed that it was she—she was reason for each script: if you note Papá’s stage directions and plaintive speeches, they were all written with her in mind. He wrote them to keep her alive. He was lucky. His eyes were going bad, a genetic malady, or maybe his heart was weak—his househelp noticed that he failed to see her blood: though it was true that he wept at her growing, infinitely labored, distracted ways. She was an actress: even unto death, she wished to act. My father, the playwright, made art out of sorrow, out of his intolerable recognition of his beloved’s slow deterioration. In his last play, Maladie Cama-Sexual,
