In Physics and Mathematics, on the other hand, I was only so-so. In Biology I had fun with nomenclature, in particular, and other aspects of taxonomy. In music I was a dunce.
I remember Father Melchior because he reminded me of fish in my hometown—a plump shiny mackerel,270 with fat funhouse flesh glistening with grease. Everyone said he was an “invert,” but a jolly good one he was, whatever an invert was. Free with the ferrule but judicious with praise, he taught me drama, and it was like some animal stirring in me, a sleeping asp or hibernating cobra, that the Spanish plays aroused, and I possessed an organic alertness, a weirdly physical response, to the scenes of dying courtesans, masked bandits, epicurean buffoons, and polyglot witches that populated that dreamlike course. In truth I was happy to leave that class when the term was done—so disconcerting was that feeling of fervid love for things that had no right to be familiar, as if I were in heaven, or some alternate place of damned repose.
But the enduring influence was Father Gaspar. He was the only indio,271 a pathetic sycophant when the need arose—hence his tenure in that space, enlightened in some areas but, let’s face it, narrow in the ways that matter. At the time I did not appreciate his timidity, the way among masters infinitely inferior to him in intellect Father Gaspar played the second-rate fool, a brown, skinny Sancho Panza and receiver of their vicious jokes. He taught first-year Latin, his skills dooming him to the illumination of principles in the Doctrina Cristiana. I must say, the required material of his skimpy syllabus flattened his genius. But I learned under his pious indulgence to return to childish reverie and recall the past (short as it was; I was only seventeen). We repeated all the lessons of the Latinidad272 273 in a single term, and with each prayer re-learnt I reviewed entire childhood episodes along with Latin declensions: there were so many hours for daydreaming in that redundant class I could have written this autobiography274 several times over, in the genitive, the ablative, the infinitive, ad infinitum. I learned later that Father Gaspar was writing a dictionary of ichthyology, his field of expertise, being from a southern island, but so far he had only reached abalone. Even his personal life was a shambles. But there was something about this priest, with his truncated talent and wistful look, that recalled to me the inside of certain clams: he was a washed-out shell. It’s not for his lessons that I owe Father Gaspar my . . .275
268 You killed . . . he killed . . . I hope that I have killed you!: shout-out to Raymundo’s killer name, an elegant catenation of grammar and desire. (Trans. Note)
269 Grammar and desire: language’s unconscious threat yoked to the explicit plot here of language acquisition. A frisson occurs in the text from that most delicious of couplings: when the conscious and unconscious both speak the hero’s name: ¡espero que yo te haya Mata-do! Part 1 of these diaries has exposed Raymundo’s primal texts. In Part 2, Raymundo begins his switch to the Master’s tongue. Education is the double-edged sword in histories of colonies, but most especially the getting of the Master’s Word, rape and reward both, benefit/bane: what gives us speech kills, thus we are. Language-acquisition becomes this Gordian knot in what seems an insoluble puzzle of identity. In the Greek legend of the knot, for King Gordius of Phrygia and Alexander the Great the reward for untying is dominion over Asia. Alexander the Great, in the consummate simplicity that marks the monster, simply cut the knot with his sword. It’s a cliché to wail, There is no Alexander’s sword for the knot of colonial language. The colonized endlessly confronts the wound of identity, and dominion over Asia will ever be deferred. But what if one just Becomes the Monster—just cut that knot with the umbilical sword, and so admit with Mürkian calm that fixed identity you seek is an illusion anyhow—Master or Servant, none of us cohere and all of us are fractured by a gaping lack? And so a terrible bemusement—that the state of the colonized is the state of all—beguiles our waking hours. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Galatia, Turkey)
270 Una caballa brillante . . . rechoncha . . . cuyas es camas esperpénticas . . . relucen con grasa: here, Raymundo’s Spanish is spotted with awkward phrases—it’s like translating a symbolist on speed. (Trans. Note)
271 Spanish caste terms are particularly troubling for a translator of nineteenth-century Filipino society. Filipino, the term that stems from the mongrel multiplicity of a fantastic history, did not exist then as we know it; it is a post-revolutionary spoil. In Raymundo’s time, people were coded not only by how much Spanish blood they had in their veins but by where and how they got that blood. Peninsulares (from Europe) were Spaniards born in Spain: highest caste. Insulares were Spaniards born in the islands: also called Filipinos. Indio is how Spaniards denoted all Filipinos without Spanish blood: an ignorant and pejorative solecism, transported from their errors in America. So what then should a translator do? Take on the Spanish prejudice by using the denotative term “indio”? Or translate it colloquially as “Filipino”? A tragic agon of colonial pain lies dramatized in quotation marks. I took the path of least resistance and just footnoted. (Trans. Note)
272 As noted, at the latinidades, such as at San Roque, pupils were taught only Latin, a dead language, as if Spanish were some kind of hidden mystical key to a garden barred from them, and Latin was its barbed wire—landmine of learning. Having learnt the power of education from their colonies in the Americas, Spain did not systematically teach its language in the islands, though novels and magazines proliferated in Spanish, and there is evidence
