I told him I’d see what I could do, and we slept on it.
Agapito left in the morning, as furtively as he had arrived, with only a few glass shards, unswept on the floor, to betray his presence.
In the afternoon two men came, a pair of strapping mariners who spoke English better than Spanish, and Spanish better than Tagalog. They were on their way home to the Visayas and gave me the money for my task. It was right up my alley, as they say—I was the perfect procurer for their needs.
I knew better than to ask them questions, being a secret revolutionary myself (though I was dying to ask where they got those stupendous biceps—just from diving off of the cliffs of Captain Cook’s seas, talaga, hah? And that accent, the burr of the Tagalog like swallowed-up Spanish: how was I to know they were used to speaking a different language—English? On the other hand, when they spoke to each other in their native Visayan, I still didn’t understand a thing).
Easily I bought them what they needed, without much haggling: quadrupled quintets of a quintet of vowels,425 plus a dozen more small letter a’s, for polysyllabic good measure.
I knew exactly where to go: Polonio the printer barely batted an eye.
I carried the types home in a ragged mat, as if returning from a late night’s work. Not even “Leandro,” the Diario’s bouncer, looked twice, busy as he was with affairs of his own, as we all learned later to our united chagrin.
I am proud to say I was part of the Capiz men’s plan to set up a printing press for the revolution.426 I am sad, however, to note my passing position in the moment.
I was merely their alphabetical pimp, so to speak, all they wanted from me were my vowels. And though I am proud that with just one word (for instance the newspaper’s diphthonged title) a stolen tetralogy of a’s exposes my fugitive presence, no one explained anything to me, not even the names of the visiting Visayans. All Agapito said was that they were pearl divers from Capiz who had won a lottery in Australia; or that they sold capiz shells to Australians who had won a lottery in the Visayas; or they were sailors from the island of Capiz who worked as pearl divers in Australia. In any case, they wished to give their money to the cause of freedom for their country, for this pearl of the Orient seas.
In sum: to describe them one needed a complicated set of predicates, whereas, in real life, they were a pair of heartbreaking naïfs.
Weren’t we all simple-minded, anyhow?
As if one throw of our die—casting off hard-earned cash, or printing up some little newsletter, the vowel-laden, wistfully titled Kalayaan—could throw off our yoke, once and for all.
And yes, we did.
I think of Agapito, a precocious organizer: he gave his mustache early to the cause, barely a teenager when he began geometrically recruiting those darned triangles among the outcast Masons. There’s purity in his young lust; and something powerful about his persistence: something I don’t get, but which tears at one’s bones. Because it’s the ashes of their early grace upon which our late fates feed.We are the cannibals of their young imaginations. Prodigies die and the whores survive. That’s what happens in revolution. Johnnies-come-lately take the spoils, heroes die young. The ones who grow old end up disappointing themselves (I will not mention what they do to others). Our governments are made by leeches, who wish only to live, and who blames them; but we forget when we talk about the glory of our war that it buried the best of us, and the country that outlived them feeds on them like maggots.427
I remember waking up to Agapito’s shadow before he left my rooms early that morning—haggard in all but his gaze, which was cheerful and quite placid. He enjoined me again to help the coming Visayans then he trudged off, who knows where, his tinsel photographic equipment clanking like armor. I didn’t think to thank him at all, to mention the merits of his abstract passion—it never occurred to me that anything any of us did required gratitude. I did not even save his shards, though I should have—
The shattered dust of his mirrors, which I swept under the rug in my entresuelo.
I was not surprised when I learned he was executed months later, one of the unlucky thirteen of Cavite, with scarcely a song to recall his name, with not a shadow of a reflection from his vanished glass.428 429
He was only twenty-three.
God rest him.
424 Silence clogs the arteries of the passionate reader, and I must speak. Raymundo’s irony is not lost on me—woe on us for our brief memories. Who remembers Agapito the agitprop photographer, uno de los trece martires? No one. The oratorical flourish in these opening passages suggests Raymundo may have been sharpening rhetoric for a future speech—a bombastic Historian’s style that perhaps anticipates (with optimistic error) that one day he might leave the cell in Bilibid and find work uselessly polishing his prose in academia, or Bulaklak magazine. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
425 Silence fails to underline Raymundo’s contribution to reality. Agoncillo, in Revolt of the Masses, notes that the Sanskrit scholar and local printer, Isabelo de los Reyes, also sold letter types to the rebels; in his document de los Reyes negotiated with Emilio Jacinto and Pio Valenzuela, not Raymundo Mata. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
426 Raymundo joins a robust band of diarists on this topic. Other memoirs that retell the chronology of the publication of that elusive legend, much-storied but unseen, that singular radical newsletter Kalayaan, precursor of all ill-fated journals in the country that, unlike the phoenix, never arise from the ashes of their first issue, include the frenetic General Jose Alejandrino’s The Price of Freedom and, of course, the lively tome of General Santiago Alvarez, referred to by fine history buffs as the “Zelig” of the revolution (or alternatively by
