Entry #384
Raymundo Mata
Escuela de Niños, Section Atis
Kawit, Cavite
“The Terror of Cavite”
Six years ago, terror struck Cavite. One day, I was quietly bathing by the river and playing tuktukan with Miong. The next day, dead ducks and the ash-flesh of fruit floated on the river. The Guardia Civil burned and looted Kawit. Children ran for their lives with chickens, servants, carabaos. The Guardia Civil was worse than the cholera. Every house in town was empty. I saw Miong fall on his head, running with the maids. (He has never fully recovered from the brain damage.) They took my uncle into the convent’s courtyard, under the buntis trellis. They said he was the culprit. The fake priest, the mestizo, who instigated the Mutiny. What the hell? He’s a real priest!85 86 87
I hid in the pigpen under the house, with the sawdust and mud. They poured urine on his head, they threw his books out the windows. The books hit his ears. His chamberpots rained on the grass, on his poor books.
After destroying the sala, they set fire to my uncle’s garden. Roses, kaimitos, kalachuchi, banyan. Razed to the ground with a sweet, oily aftersmell that lasted for weeks. Jackfruit trees with swaddling spines, mango branches heavy with fruit, guavas, their easily fried leaves—they were all toast for the wind. Fruit trees burned with anomalous perfume under which we dreamed88 89 90 91 92 for days. Roasted flakes of mango peels, flints of rose-thorn embers, ashes of bamboo hearts—the burned ground smelled like the mulch of flowers from the May parades.
For us kids, it was an orgy of fruit-gathering. We tasted the merits of scorched guava versus wood-burned papaya. We hurt our lips. Chafed our cheeks on barbecued kalamansi and blackened chili blooms—saplings from the south, my uncle’s favorite among the plants in his garden93
A few early sections of the manuscript are academic effluvia—well-preserved school essays in schoolboy script. (Trans. Note)
85 The family refutes the accusation that his uncle, Tio U., was the Filipino in the costume of a priest who instigated the mestizo soldiers of Cavite to revolt. First of all, he was a real priest. Second, it was his brother the actor who liked costumes. In sum, the mutiny was just an excuse to loot the old priest’s garden and terrorize him in his own home! (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
86 When one makes of one’s identity a performance, is it still one’s identity? Regarding this paradox of the human, Mürk pondered in the Parables: “If a llama sees his furry shadow in a forest and says, that is I, is he still a llama?” (Dr. Diwata Drake, Cuzco, Peru)
87 It is tempting to consider the role of the priest’s brother, the actor Jorge Raymundo, a.ka. el genio Jote, as the costumed man in a priest’s outfit who exhorted revolt during the Cavite Mutiny. But no reliable records but gossip from Spanish friars of the time and a plotline from Alexandre Dumas give evidence of such a disguised rebel. (Trans. Note)
88 It’s true that I, when I smell a ripe guava, am transported instantly to those days at my grandfather’s riverine home, and my being chokes—I am suffused, half-deafened—with memory, so that the term “homesick” contains within it something deadly, a visceral “sick”-ness, and I need to get back to bed and lie down and weep for the loss of things. All for a guava! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
89 I’m not sure. The word “dream” may be an analytic cue, where language gives away reality. This “academic effluvium,” if not a literal dream, portends a fantastic memory. The wondrous specificity of its content possesses a healthy irreality that may suggest a retrospective text. Is it possible that he did not write this when he was ten? And in what language was this, Ms. Translator? (Dr. Diwata Drake, Cuzco, Peru)
90 It is, let’s see. How odd. It is in English. (Trans. Note)
91 Dr. Diwata, again we must differ. After all, you’re a cynical bastard, while I’m an acolyte of truth. Why must this be “wondrous” rather than actual? My experience tells me that fruit, in sensitive souls (a notion perhaps foreign to you—o foul-hearted Fowl!), produces a “wondrous specificity.” It is indisputable that tropical fruit has an insidious reality. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
92 Ah. So I am the Fowl? Oh Starry-eyed Mirror, espejo most gullible—you are the Gull. I do not dispute truth when I talk of dream. I point out only the provocative qualities of the boy’s recollection, or anyone’s recollection for that matter. If you ask me, “dreams” are facts; it’s being awake that’s overrated. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Vence, France)
93 Unpunctuated, as usual. (Trans. Note)