The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

by fellow Filipinos. (One notes that Aguinaldo, in turn, was betrayed, though not killed, by Filipino turncoats in America’s pay.) This duplicitous sense of self, the Judas wound, marks the country’s notion of its humanity, so potent in its history. We agonize over that which makes us imperfect, most human. For our enemy, we conveniently ignore that war’s obvious, material problem: the islands’ subsequent occupation by the United States: hello! Why were some memoirs published and not others? Ask that! Only in the story of Rizal is there no Judas kiss, which may explain why, given the country’s complex aversion to the past, it clings to the hero Rizal with implacable ardor. Rizal’s death is simple: Spain killed him. Filipinos are not complicit in his blood. Emilio “Miong” Aguinaldo, on the other hand, is troubling—he is the man in us whom we prefer not to see: the sinner in our midst who is ourselves. Just as we will never see Rizal as a man because we idolize him, we will not see Aguinaldo as a man because we vilify him. (Dr. Diwata Drake, New York, New York, U.S.A.)

401 Whoa, Aramis de Michigan. Calm down. (Trans. Note)

402 Dr. Diwata, let me explain the physical nature of my “implacable ardor,” as you call it—though you do not deserve my patience! I recall distinctly when my illness began, this withering in my arteries, my stultified knees. It was late in June in the year martial law was lifted by the tyrant, and yet the country was no more changed than I was by the proclamation. I was a freshman in college taking Philippine History and Institutions 101. I had always been a bookworm, an idealist—yes, as you say, a fantasist. As a kid, I used to collect the posters of the heroes and labeled them with their corresponding epithets, because I was a nerd with weird compulsions. When I learned about the political assassination of the Plebeian Martyr, Andres Bonifacio, by the men of the First President of the Republic, Emilio Aguinaldo, I was not only surprised that I had never heard about it before in my high school textbooks: I went into septic shock. My breathing froze in that room at Palma Hall Annex, and my asphyxiated shriek before I slumped sideways from the graffitied desk onto the lap of my blockmate, a pale, kind of palsied kid from Panay, made the entire classroom go still (or so I was told, as I had gone into abasic atrophy, a kind of failure of the nerves). I remember (or fancy I do) the ambulance, the brief blur of flame trees in my rolling vision, the concerned face of my professor (the bifocaled, unwitting perpetrator of my nervous wreckage), as I was strapped onto a trundle, given emergency respiratory help, a blood pump, a pale, camphor mask. My classmates waved at me as if calculating already whether or not they could take time off to go to my funeral. It was a minor seizure whose source the doctors could not fathom—whether I was epileptic, schistempsychotic, or just plain pathetic, it was a mystery to them. I returned home for the rest of the term, and in those months all history books, even komiks versions, were banned. But secretly I read. By the end of the year I was back at college, but this time armed with the weight of history—not to mention all the kilos I had gained from provincial bibingka, lumpia, and puto. In this way I became a vessel of the country’s pain, a small price to pay for truth. If this is a symptom, then what is a country? A tumor of ideology?! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)

403 Yes. (Dr. Diwata Drake, New York, New York, U.S.A.)

Entry #26

1896

So many things to remember, so many faces!404

404 Where’s the rest? The revolution begins in August 1896, Caviteños led by “Miong” triumph over the Spaniards in September 1896, Dr. Rizal’s trial begins in November 1896, then the hero is executed on the penultimate day of 1896, etc. etc. In short, this year in the journal covers a major swath of history. Too bad it’s glossed over. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)

Entry #27

April 30 [1896?]

Pilgrimage to Antipolo. This time Miong’s stern brother Mang Crispulo takes the lead, the old servant, my old comrade Rufino Mago arriving with him and carrying the bags of all the travelers. Miong is absent. Once again they sleep in my rooms, eat my bread, and drink my barako. It’s all okay, if they told me why they were doing this—attending frivolous feasts when they should be planning for war! I mean, sure the Virgin is a good enough spirit, but the priest of Antipolo is a fat pig who is raking in money on Mang Crispulo’s misguided piety. Did no one read Fray Botod, or that wit Dimasalang’s revelatory vision of Fray Rodriguez?405 Where was our anticlerical spine: shouldn’t we be tossing rosaries into the river instead of brandishing them like sheep?

Santiago, that hypocrite, kept nudging me in the chest to keep quiet. Did he not make me swear in Trozo to get rid of the friars, and now here he was at a priestly carnival with a bunch of praying cows?

I know, I know, when I got on this banca with the traveling devotees from the provinces, I should have trusted my instincts and run away from this herd of fanatics. But I was also their host. And they did bring whole jars of tuba, red-blooded and freshly fermented, splashing amid the scapulars.

I was too polite to decline their invitation.

Out on the waters of the Pasig, our fluvial party floated with the rest of the Philippines—citizens from islands as far-flung as Capiz, towns as craggy as Cabanatuan and sleepy as Pansol. They were singing hymns, playing cards, carrying passive pigs unaware of our plots for their doom.

Fireworks deafened everyone’s devotion.

Bands marched on shore in full regalia, oblivious of our loss of hearing. For some reason