Entry #5
p 3 Cunegonde; garden
p 3 Idoy’s namesake? Ha ha97
p 10 “en un lugar de la Mancha cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme”
How the Portuguese98 Made a Superb Auto-Da-Fe to Prevent Any Future Earthquakes, and How Candido99 Underwent Public Flagellation
After the earthquake,100 which had destroyed three-fourths of the city of Lisbon,101 the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to preserve the kingdom from utter ruin than to entertain the people with an auto-da-fe,102 it having been decided by the University of Coimbra,103 104 that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible preventive of earthquakes.105
In consequence thereof they had seized on a Biscayan106 for marrying his godmother, and on two Bulgarians107 for taking out the bacon of a larded pullet108 they were eating; after dinner they came and secured Don Felipe Enrile,109 and his pupils Candido and Miong,110 the one for speaking his mind, and the other two for seeming to approve what he had said. They were conducted to separate apartments, extremely cool, where they were never incommoded with the sun. Eight days afterwards they were each dressed in a sanbenito, and their heads were adorned with paper mitres. The mitre and sanbenito worn by Candido and Miong were painted with flames reversed and with devils that had neither tails nor claws; but Don Felipe Enrile’s devils had both tails and claws, and his flames were upright. In these habits they marched in procession, and heard a very pathetic sermon, which was followed by an anthem, accompanied by bagpipes. Candido and Miong were flogged to some tune, while the anthem was being sung; the Biscayan and the two Intsik who would not eat bacon were burned, and Don Felipe Enrile was hanged, which is not a common custom at these solemnities. The same day there was another earthquake, which made most dreadful havoc.
Candido and Miong, amazed, terrified, confounded, astonished, all bloody, and trembling from head to foot, said to themselves, “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others? If we had only been whipped, we could have put up with it, as we did among the Binakayan-ons; but, not withstanding, oh my dear Felipe! my beloved master! thou greatest of philosophers! that ever we should live to see thee hanged, without knowing for what! O my Crispulo, thou best of men, that it should be thy fate to be drowned in the very harbor! O Miss Di-Ganda, you mirror of young ladies! that it should be your fate to have your body ripped open!”
They were making the best of their way from the place where they had been preached to, whipped, absolved and blessed, when they were accosted by an old woman, who said to them, “Take courage, boys, and follow me.”111 112
97 Idoy: Candido Tria Tirona, previously cited cousin and future general, martyred under a sampaloc tree after the Battle of Binakayan; a.k.a. the Hero of Binakayan, because he died; estranged from Raymundo in their adolescent years. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
98 Craftily, the budding satirist Raymundo substitutes “Portuguese” for “Spaniard,” and “auto-da-fe” for “burning of Cavite” in this picaresque romp that he wrote when he was only ten! The prose, one must admit, is a bit dense—but what clever allegory! What sarcastic semblance of his weeping country’s fate! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
99 Here, Raymundo makes his cousin Idoy, a.k.a. Candido Tria Tirona, his fable’s hero, though later in the memoir he fails to mention at all Candido’s doomed valor in the actual war. In fact, he forgets Candido altogether. Clearly, this section is a prophetic paean to all victims of war! This is the diarist’s strategy: he hides true meanings in patriotic symbols, and makes of the intelligent reader an undertaker, a patient digger of his buried pieties. Me, to be honest—I’d rather just attend the funeral. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
100 Sad and portentous reference to the monumental 1863 earthquake in Manila that killed Archbishop Pedro Pelaez and destroyed Manila Cathedral. Young Padre Burgos, future martyr of the Cavite Mutiny, took over Pelaez’s duties as canon of Manila, setting in place a chain of bitterness among the Spanish religious orders, who resented the Filipino’s rise. One might claim that Burgos’s exalted position led to his death by envy in 1872. Thus, the earthquake, indirectly, set up conditions for the “quake” of revolution years later. (Trans. Note)
101 i.e., Manila. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
102 Human barbecue; lechon de tao; obviously a metaphor for the conditions of tyrannous ruin then settling on Raymundo’s beloved Cavite. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
103 Perhaps a corruption of Calamba, Rizal’s birthplace?—as if “Calamba [Coimbra]” were a metonym for Rizal, who is in his own person a “university,” thus “University of Coimbra,” metonymizing Rizal himself, makes sense in this sly legend. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
104 What are you talking about, Estrella?? Coimbra is a city in Portugal, where a great earthquake also happened—the setting of Voltaire’s great, anticlerical Englightenment novel, Candide. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Paris, France)
105 A stroke of genius! A world of invention here, in this ironic statement on the tribulations of such people as Raymundo’s priest-uncle, tortured by the Guardia Civil; also of Rizal’s mother, who was “roasted on a slow fire,” so to speak, as she marched in chains barefoot from Calamba in the burning Laguna heat, a sight that also traumatized Rizal as a child, just as the traumatized Raymundo had watched soldiers burn his uncle’s garden. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
106 A typo? Biscay is on the wrong continent, a site in Iberia. Or does he mean Biscay’s Filipino ‘sister,’ the province of Nueva Vizcaya—capital: Bayombong? My vote: Bisayan—an allusion to Raymundo’s lamented mother, a talented Waray actress. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
107 i.e., perhaps Bul-anons (as in Boholanos—a notoriously vagabond, lovely people). (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
108 i.e., lechon manok. [sic! I know, I know, you Spanish-language nerds—chickens do not have mammary glands! It’s a Filipino joke!] (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
109 Don Felipe Enrile: Raymundo’s revered maestro at the Escuela de Niños. Also lauded for his kind heart and intelligence by Miong, i.e., Emilio Aguinaldo, in his Gunita (though the learned maestro seemed not to have done the dropout Aguinaldo much good). Precocious Raymundo dedicates his ingenious labors here to his teacher. That he shows his esteem by burning him to death only reveals a boyish sense of humor. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
110 Schoolboy humor: comic allusion to two classmates. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
111 This lively section was a challenge to translate from its decrepit original. The antiquated, convoluted syntax (e.g., “they were never incommoded with the sun,” bad passive-voice habit of Romance languages, when all he meant to say was, damn they froze to death); outmoded details, which I kept intact (e.g., sanbenito, garments worn by criminals sentenced to burn by the medieval Inquisition); and other obsolete ingredients tested my poor powers. I hope I have not added nor detracted from the oracular ideas that glimmered in this section. (Trans. Note)
112 I note the translator’s disclaimer above—as if you could not tell this apart from Chapter Six of Voltaire’s Candide, translated into English and easily downloaded from Google! As for my esteemed colleague, I will have to point out that Estrella Espejo’s ejaculatory interpolations on this text are wrong once again—wrong, wrong, wrong!—serial misreadings of a woeful kind. Inexplicably, the young Raymundo’s manuscript inserts Voltaire’s Candide word for word, except for substitutions of random names in the manuscript [Don Felipe for Pangloss, Miss Di-Ganda for Cunegonde, etc.]. Yes, he is precocious—but a precocious plagiarist! However, “oracular,” the translator’s term, is, in my view, also correct. It would have been impossible for Raymundo, a sensitive boy in late nineteenth-century Philippines, not to see the parallels to his country’s condition in the anticlerical satire he’s writing down word for word; just as it is impossible for Estrella not to read Raymundo in the paragraphs from Voltaire. You will find translations of Candide, a.k.a. Candido, even in Pangalatoc or Ilocano in Manila’s antiquarian bookshops (Estrella’s errors, on the other hand, need not proliferate). Thus, despite herself, Estrella’s “misreadings,” her anachronisms, are accurate. It could be, who knows, a reading that did ring in Raymundo’s bones. “Anachronism is to the unconscious what honey is to bees or sounds are to syllables—we read in desire, not in time” (Drake, Dux, and Ménårdsz, Eds., Readings of the Rhizome: An Annotation of Claro Mürk’s Parable IV [The Garden], page 21). (Dr. Diwata Drake, Vence, France)