133 Not knowing whether I should insert this otherwise clean, intact Tagalog fragment, which Raymundo separates into its own page, in an apparent state of incompleteness awaiting further inspiration, I keep it in its place, next to the “essay” (#9). All indications (the same boyishly careful handwriting; lined paper; complex sentences mixed with periodic phrases) show that the fragment may be part of an essay (#9) that he had meant to be a full autobiography, cut short by the fervent, touching digression, apologia sua Tio U., the sweet defense of his uncle. (Trans. Note)
134 Family memory does not deal kindly with Raymundo’s mother—after all, she’s an in-law. Her origins are ridiculed but only guessed at (“ay, Bisaya—siguro Waray!” was their laughing response to me when I asked—ignorant regionalists!). Mixture of orphan slattern and provincial diva, she was, like her husband, a mestiza whose itinerant beauty indicates she may have been of the priest’s-seed caste, that disgusting trend in nineteenth-century Philippines. They met when she played Mary Magdalene to el genio Jote’s novice Jesus, but what’s intact through the Mata generations are not the details but a historic ribald innuendo about their meeting—which says more about the family than about the couple, if you ask me. Disowned by his father, the delinquent Don Jorge Raymundo Mata, el genio Jote, eloped with his dulce estranjera and took their talents on the road. When she died, c. 1870s, he left his son with his loving, long-suffering brother and disappeared, apparently inconsolably bereaved (though that may be a family fiction to mitigate his paternal failings). As a dramatist, he was bombastic and therefore much in demand. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
135 The fluid conflation of his father’s plots with other, more famous texts is not a surprising case of anxious influence: “How unbearably progenitive is the wit of the unconscious?” The answer was Mürk’s most famous remark: “It’s criminal, my dear Pedro.” [Mürk, Queries for Ménårdsz at the Analytic Arboretum, Antibes, 1967] (Dr. Diwata Drake, Reading, England)
136 Popular nineteenth-century play, imported from France; the playwright, Dumas fils, was not only part-black but illegitimate, which made him doubly irresistible to revolutionists, who were sentimental, like many radicals. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
137 Dumas fils was the great-grandchild of a Haitian slave and her French-nobleman lover, grandchild of Napoleon’s foremost general, later Napoleon’s enemy, and son of France’s best-read novelist, that is, the actual heir of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo. Thus, the French contribution to Filipino letters must be situated in its mulatto context—or not. (Trans. Note)
138 Hybrid, schmybrid! French novels translated into the Spanish (and some into Tagalog) were popular among the nineteenth-century bourgeois classes. This explains both Raymundo’s diction and his weepy sensibility. Even his bastard Shakespeareanisms have a French perfume, as if translated from some Parisian feuilleton. I regret that we somewhat owe our revolution, not just colognes and overpriced scarves, to France. For further information on the connection between Filipino revolutionary emotion and French intellectual movements, including the French Revolution, see my incisive paper, Francophone Philippines: A Bibliographical History from 1789-1899—Bourrienne’s Napoleon to Turot’s Aguinaldo (unpublished). Or actually, just do what I did and look up the list of books in Rizal’s library. Such is the bastardy of the revolution—its library drowned us in Europe’s sewers while our souls—nurse, nurse, I just want my lugaw filled with luy-a, right now! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
139 Uhum, ehem, Estrella. I believe lugaw is a Chinese dish, and ginger was indigenous not to Leyte but to India. Nothing is entirely one’s own and singular. (Trans. Note)
140 Does not make my desire any less mine. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
141 As if in mid-cough, the description ends. Borrowed symptoms, imported syndromes: how much of our parents’ tedious destiny do we ingest? Raymundo’s dramatic delusions, his manic literacy, not to mention the precocious hypermnesia of a world not his own—like an organic fallacy, Raymundo’s ills sweetly shadow his parents’ lives. But here I agree with Estrella: who are we to speculate and spy, to cure him of his sorrows? “To seek a cure is our lasting fantasy; only in analysis do we vibrate and speak” [Pedro Ménårdsz to Claro Mürk, addendum to Epistles No. 54]. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Kalamazoo, Michigan)
Entry #11142
“El jardin de las lenguas que se bifurcan”143 144
Miong: Si, tu. Tu mi engañar—145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153
Idoy: Oh God, my Lord—don’t say that wor—154
Miong: It is written. The cock crows and thrice you will—
Idoy: Don’t say it. Blasphemy. Jesus Christ!
Bulag: Is this the man? Are you the King of the Jews?
Miong: Putragis! Bulag!155 God Knows Hudas Not Pay!
Idoy: Caramba! My sleeve is shorn!
Miong: Yawa nga de puquis!156
Idoy: Aaaah! Take that! Infidel! An arm for a pocket, shin for a sleeve!
Miong: It is true—your God must be—the one and only—
Idoy: Die, oh Moor, and know that Prince Vilardo, Count of Andalucia, has once more plucked the feathers from the infidels’ infamous—.157
Bulag: I wash my hands.
Idoy: Oh no you don’t. Crucify him.
142 What follows is another gestational text, a vestigial gill of language, passionately religious, that permeates the memoirist’s childhood. (Trans. Note)
143 That is, “The Garden of Split Speech” or alternatively “. . . of Forked Tongues.” The title indicates this piece is either a moro-moro drama or pasyon play, in this case a riff on the biblical Agony in the Garden. (Trans. Note)
144 Moro-moro: costume drama with boring Manichean themes, usually involving the bloody deaths of Muslims, whom Spaniards called moros, happily transferring their prejudices upon their colonies. Hate this drama—so black-and-white. Pasyon: Lenten seasonal play that followed the ups and downs, mostly downs, of the life of Christ. Love this drama—so people-oriented. The plebeian Christ is symbolic of the suffering of the Filipino
