“Since the beginning of the colony, boldness, deceit, and acrimonious speech have had a foremost seat, but greed is today the dominant passion in the white people. Their needs are many and there are few means of satisfying them.”
Okay, okay, so let the blonde scholar have her say.
Yes, it is I who showed her Mimi C. Magsalin’s translated text.
I have yet to recover from my error.
On my hospital bed here at the sanatorium among the coconut groves of Leyte’s storied beaches, where Douglas MacArthur the general landed in triumph and Ferdinand Magellan the circumnavigator landed only to die, that’s what he got, killed by us, the Visayans! Hah!—may I add a few remarks on imperial commentators.
It may surprise some to know that the above insightful statement came not from nineteenth-century Filipino reformists Graciano Lopez-Jaena or Marcelo H. del Pilar. Not even Dr. Jose Rizal, the national hero, executed by the Spaniards in Bagumbayan for his “pernicious” first novel, was so explicit.27
No, the author of the above was a Spanish military official, probable antecedent of our glorious hero Raymundo.
General Juan Manuel de la Matta occurs in history as the author of a report to the governor and captain-general28 of the islands on February 25, 1843.29 Thus the life of the Matas [Mattas] in the Philippines begins with writing. Each Mata [Matta] shares pet peeves.
Born in Kawit, Cavite—birthplace also of Miong, a.k.a. General Emilio Aguinaldo, later first president of the Republic—Raymundo Mata spent a cheerful youth swimming among mangroves, shitting in the Binakayan river with his boon companions, Miong and Candido Tria Tirona, a.k.a. Idoy, and discovering his manhood with the most loyal and beloved confrères, Benigno Santi and Agapito Conchu (with whom in grammar school he formed this memoir’s precious triumvirate, the Three Musketeers of San Roque).
His childhood, of course, had an ominous frame—the legendary Cavite Mutiny, precursor of the Revolution of 1896.
But during the Mutiny, he was only a kid, munching on guavas.
An infirm boy whose disability became his ironic claim to fame, Raymundo was bullied, siempre, in elementary school, at the Escuela de Niños, and at grammar school, the Latinidad de Jose Basa, where he met the tragic Agapito, his first love, and the saintly Benigno, his last friend.
It is unlikely that he saw his future, unrequited amor, Rizal the bookworm, in the hallways of the Ateneo Municipal when he transferred to that more prestigious high school in the capital, Manila. By the time Raymundo arrived in Manila, Rizal was a success in Europe, toast of the reformists in Madrid and Barcelona, of Spaniards and Filipinos alike, globetrotting medical student who published novels in Berlin and Belgium and traveled even as far as New York, in America (where he thought the nation’s industry was marvelous but its slave-history a disgrace).
But like Rizal, the young Raymundo was a mad scribbler at the Ateneo—he jotted juvenile sentiments in diaries, wrote bad plays, inscribed love letters to witchy women, and made tsismis—puerile, unworthy gossip!—about his rabble-rousing male friends, in code.
If one thing characterized the hero Raymundo Mata, it was his gift for idolatry.
In August 1896 Raymundo took up arms against the “white people,” having joined the secret revolutionary society, the Katipunan, five months earlier.
No less than the founder of the Katipunan, Andres Bonifacio, the Supremo, swore Raymundo into the Society (his old childhood friend Miong also came along, but that’s another story).
Raymundo, inexperienced in both love and war, was barely out of his teens in 1896—bookish, dreamy, and night-blind.
Not an auspicious recruit.
(In fact Miong later claimed he did not really want him along at the initiation rites of the Katipunan, because, quote unquote, even as a kid Raymundo was a loon. On the kalesa leading to the initiation, Miong made jokes about his friend’s redundant blindfold, and their small altercation before the Katipunan blood compact was not a good sign.)
Raymundo put his life into the revolution. In fact, he gave it to the cause. It’s not so clear exactly what he did.
His role in revolt has been shrouded in obscurity.
Until this memoir.
A boat ride he took with Dr. Pio Valenzuela to see the ophthalmologist and novelist, Dr. Jose Rizal, was a disaster, so say judgmental historians.
But in the memoirs, as you will see, Raymundo made much of his short acquaintance with the martyr.
Just like his descendant Raymundo Mata, the Spanish official General de la Matta of 1843 lambasted Spaniards—Filipino Spaniards in particular, that is, whiteys born in the Philippine islands, also known as Filipinos (today’s Filipinos, as we know, were not originally Spanish cookies—shame on you, Spanish biscuit company, go to hell!30—since Filipinos were at the time called indios, not to be mixed up with Indians, who actually called themselves Pequots or Mashantucket or Lakota, not subcontinental “Hindoos”; and so on and so forth in this mindless game of history tag).
Among the jewels of intuition in the 1843 Matta Report are Matta’s characterization of his own people, his indictment of the Spanish clergy, his prophecy of violent doom if Spain failed to make reforms, and his malice toward lawyers—sentiments also applicable to his descendant.
Of the Spanish friars [Matta notes with impartial sagacity]:
[Their] gross manners, stupid pretensions, and exactions from the chiefs of the provinces and the gobernadorcillos and notables of the villages occasion anger, quarrels and discord which disturb the quiet of the inhabitants, distract and embarrass the authorities, and nourish those indiscreet and tenacious struggles in which all lose.
Thus, as early as 1843, in a nutshell General de la Matta summarized the demons of Spanish dominion, the friars, that prefaced all sorts of rants against Spain during the time of the revolution—among both Spanish civil servants and the revolutionaries who opposed them.
General de la Matta, of course, was no revolutionary, so his secular venom is remarkable.
Whereas, to our modern ears, the anticlerical rage (“indiscreet and tenacious”) of Raymundo Mata (or even of Rizal, for that matter) is trite, obsolete, commonplace—the spite of subalterns.
So goes the sad march of history—the wars we waged become tiresome tropes, and blood spilled turns into
