Curiously, critics from Yogyakarta have both denounced the script as inauthentic as well as demanded that jug’s return.
At the same time it seems that Raymundo’s manuscript is not entirely innocent of transgressions on the Arabic, though mainly in regard to suspect nouns, e.g., odd mutations on terms for grape derivatives, also of words for “fig.” Raymundo has spatterings of Waray (errant strains from his unknown mother?—a tragic story1), pidgin and random Cebuano, as well as nominal, surly Ilocano. Elsewhere cryptic notes of Cavite-Chabacano occur, fruity, with a slightly buttery-chocolate taste, good for pork but not fish. In short, a grand Babel of the Filipino soul marinates in the manuscript like some wet mix of adobo, pancit, and lugaw.2 3
It’s important to note that his Tagalog, erudite as it is (especially when he deals with anatomy), is irreversibly contaminated by the Spanish.
General Mata’s use of Spanish must be addressed if any reader is to appreciate this text at all. In 1896, as we all know, Mother Spain was no welter of fabulous ambiguity. Spain was the tyrant of the islands.
Since 1521.
It’s true that chunks of conservatism regularly fell off like rotting teeth from the obsolete dentures of the King of Spain. And yes, Spain had commanded the islands by indirection, if not misdirection, via the Viceroy of Mexico, for three hundred seventy-five years—give or take a few months of British occupation of Manila and Cavite (coincidentally, twin rebel loci of our hero’s childhood).
The worst were the friars—the actual rulers of the islands. At times the only Spaniards in far-flung parishes, the feeble frailes kept feeling like Kings.
Sure, some note the religious orders did have their de las Casas4 5 6 7 8 types: missionary warriors or navigator-scientists, third sons with ambition in their hearts.
In sum: after 1492, when they finally kicked out the Jews, the dregs of Spain’s anti-Semitic soldiers found themselves with nothing to do (some were even Jewish). So says the Basque historian Salvador de Madariaga. Many of them took on the cassock and found their notions of grandeur satisfied in a coconut and banana-strewn archipelago, filled with ripe papayas to their hearts’ content. They learned the island languages but kept their own tongue. Dictionaries of Chabacano and Pangalatoc and Waray abound, scribbled by nosy, lonesome friars, when they weren’t torturing the natives to fetch them water, make them paper flowers, or sculpt their wooden Christs. Not to mention indulging in bedroom affairs (yes, yes, Professor Estrella: they were scalawags and rapists, for whom the above papayas are only metonyms for their ripe lusts!). When the Filipinos came into their own as people of the faith and wanted a piece of the sacristy for themselves—demanding to become priests of their own parishes—hell, no, said the friars. When Filipinos wanted to own their own lands, hell, no, said the friars. When Filipinos began to write their own books, oh no, you don’t, they said.
It was the frailes who agitated to condemn those fin-de-siècle writers and local printers and native priests and mestizo rebels to death.
However, rebellion in this pelagic not-yet-nation was not so peculiar.
For instance: in 1896, the Filipino rebels’ nemesis, Miguel Primo de Rivera, at the time a twenty-six-year-old colonel of the Spanish army in Manila, went on to become the dictator of Spain (1923-1930)—clearly, a premodern type.
Miguel Primo de Rivera became the jailer of the existentialist philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and antecedent of the historical fiasco Francisco Franco. Primo de Rivera turned out to be a thoughtless crusader not only against the insurrectos, as Filipinos were indiscriminately called by the katsila,9 a.k.a. coño (as Filipinos indiscriminately called the katsila)—but also against his own people, the Spaniards. This comes as no surprise except to all of us who could care less about history.
Should it comfort Filipinos to know that an enemy of their liberators was direct progenitor of a whole bloodline of fascists, founders of the Falangist Party, so that Filipino revolutionaries are linked to saintly anarchists, radical victims, and lovely socialists such as George Orwell, not to mention impotent dilettantes, such as Hemingway?
It should, but this late in history—que se joda?,10 as my mother would say.
And so it is that the nineteenth-century Spanish of this memoir’s heroes has about it the romantic fervor of a steamy liaison with a voluptuous mistress—a whole sauna bath of soggy metaphors. Raymundo Mata’s prose possesses the Spanish of incipient amor: faintly medieval, awash in cultish linguistic sulfur. The academic language of the revolutionaries marries anarchic spleen with romantic chivalry, giving birth to deeply troubling progeny—that is, anti-clerical Masons who went to church.11
It is not necessarily to my complete dissatisfaction that the rigors of history have divorced the country from the Spanish lengua.12 13 But some regret what was lost in that linguistic divide, namely, a rather large bulk of the nation’s patrimony, maybe fifty kilos’ worth.
As for the particulars of the Spanish begotten in Raymundo Mata, or misbegotten as the case may be: as we all know now, since Dr. Diwata Drake, late of Magdalen College in Oxford, now gallivanting around the globe, already blabbed all about it before we went to press (but I shall not expound on that here, as the klepto lawsuit is ongoing, I have nothing to do with it)—the general was brought up in a priest’s kumbento, in the home of his uncle, an island-born half-katsila of the cassock, committed to Christ.
True, the uncle, called Tio U. in this coded diary, seems to have been only a coadjutor, a lowly assistant priest. Who knows what axes this unpromoted man had to grind? He and his brother, Raymundo’s father, were mestizo coño—sons of a Basque policeman, of the Guardia Civil, and his lowland wife, a businesswoman, specifically, a vendor of lamp-oil. The lowly status of Raymundo’s uncle among
