But more interesting: the boy was educated in the theater.
From birth, Raymundo Mata was immersed in the world of make-believe.
His father, Jorge Raymundo Mata, a.k.a. el genio Jote, was the priest Tio U.’s beloved wastrel brother—an itinerant actor in provincial melodramas.
Who ended up a bandit.
Sad, but true.
His mother, the Leyteña, Maria Tarcela, or Marcela (her legend remains cloudy), was an actress of religious dramas, Shakespearean follies, and plagiarisms of Alexandre Dumas, père et fils, all couched in the fatalisms of the era’s faith.
She died young.
This might explain the similarities in morbid sensitivity between Raymundo and another orphaned son of theater, Edgar Allan Poe of America.
In any case, it’s no surprise that the language of religious street drama—moro-moro, pasyon, senakulo, all the detritus of the vulgate Bible—infects Raymundo’s speech like dengue.
Muddying up the issue are obfuscating whiffs of ancient Roman gas and wanton allusions to classical Greek—indecently undigested. This curse of nineteenth-century syntax was the crap of latinidades, the Spanish era’s grammar schools of shifty curricula often denounced by its privileged victims. Asides of florid oratory, leaps into Solomonic metaphysics—all of these were hard to stomach, much less translate. Add to this the irritating lapses into indigenous, oracular speech—
I tried my best.
In particular, Raymundo favored the diction of Pontius Pilate, a role he is said to have played several times in Lenten passion spectacles with quite a dash.
His years of furtive education as a bastard child in a baptistry added layers to his style, the effects of which my own speech has yet to banish.
I presume that many of the “set pieces,” unusually incoherent paragraphs of disturbing resonance, may have been cribbed verbatim from some philosopher of note, perhaps of the Spanish Enlightenment (though some maintain that term is an oxymoron). He had a freakish memory even as a child, according to Caviteños—those well-meaning citizens on that revolutionary mass off of Manila Bay. However, it may be, as Professor Estrella suggests, that Caviteños are particularly ill suited to recognize genius.
There is the issue of his night-blindness, a mild yet creeping debility that he seems blissfully to ignore through most of these confessions, a clear triumph of his (manic) will. Tragically, he succumbs to darkness, his old friend, only toward the end, mainly in the guise of sloppy handwriting.
In the center—or, if you will, eccenter—of all of this is the character Raymundo Mata himself.
The man you will find in the manuscript has no approximate precursor in the annals of the revolution, perhaps even of humankind.
The original sheaves are a bunch of papers in multifarious guises—some handwritten, some typed, some in fine script, some practically illegible, some in green ink, some in that crust of sepia drool, with a kind of spiderweb-splatter of time’s ink draining from the grainy scrawl.
It’s worth no one’s while to pillage that mess: but it rewarded my time.
The problems this text presents to a translator are obvious.
Beset in almost each sentence by a question of literary provenance, obscure native diction, and Raymundo Mata’s increasingly frightening schizoid tendencies, I gave up and took long meditative walks.
Nevertheless, we the future owe him gratitude.
Curiously Raymundo Mata reverted to English in the latter parts of his journal. At first he seems to write as if testing the waters, in baby-step English if you will. In the end Raymundo mastered English, but English raped him.
You’ll see.
Mimi C. Magsalin (pseud.)
B.A. History, University of the Philippines-Diliman & Smith College; Ph.D. Comparative Literature, minor Asian Studies, Cornell University (not yet a.b.d.)
1 Oh the transgressions, you can call them that, on the life of his sad mother! The late lamented Leyteña, Maria Tarcela, or is it Marcela—whom Caviteños fail to acknowledge as the crux—the heart—the haunting ghost in young Raymundo’s story—as is the case of all Filipinos and their mothers, if you think about it, really. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
2 Ah how I remember the luxury of lugaw as a kid, whenever I was sick in bed and stayed home from school—my mom’s specialty, flavored with cinnamon and molasses. Those are the moments I remember most about my robust nanay, maker of sinanlag and ladler of hipon (not that bland Tagalog bagoong!)—her own art, mix of shrimp and chili, with the occult taste of the sea and the earthy residue of baptismal fonts! Not this damned watery vileness—this cheap, mealy mash, this glum slime—that the nurses keep giving me! I have fragility of the nerves, not gum disease: can’t I get real, decent rice, at least! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
3 Fragile nerves! You’re a spastic imbecile. I mean, a special ambassador. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Anaheim, California)
4 Really, Ms Translator? Who are you kidding—we had no Bartolome de las Casas in our sucesos, no eloquent curser of the conquistadores. We had Padre Damaso and Padre Salvi. Scalawags! Demonio! Spoilers of women and faith! Whose side are you on, Ms. Translator?? (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
5 Uuuh. Professor Estrella: Padre Damaso and Padre Salvi were fictional characters created by the hero-novelist Rizal. Though, true: Spanish priests were the devil. And that is the summa of Spanish history in the Philippines. (Trans. Note)
6 True! Father Damaso and Father Salvi are brain-children of Rizal, just like the country! Ah, how Rizal portrayed the truth. Just look at the demon friars’ spawn, the deathly pale mestizos all around us! Diyos ko ‘day! A ghostly people created in ungodly lust! Though I do like their cochinillo, t.b.h. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
7 Uuuuh. Rizal was a mestizo, Professor Estrella? (Trans. Note)
8 Ah, there’s the rub. That the country arises from fiction, but this makes the demons no less true. Such is the fate of fantastic Nation. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Copenhagen, Denmark)
9 Filipinos used the term katsila, or, in the orthography of the time, kachila, to refer to both the Spanish person (Castilian/castellano) and the Spanish tongue. Even
