Entry #9
Raymundo Mata
Latinidad de Jose Basa
San Roque, Cavite
“My Family”
His father disowned him. Publicly, in the plaza. Don Raymundo Mata (it’s said he clipped his surname, Mata Eibarrazeta, to fit the badge on his uniform) whipped his son, my Papá, el genio Jote, through the fiesta crowds with the blunted leather of his old Guardia Civil lash. Some say it was a cynical drama, a ploy to keep the family’s lands. It worked. My grandfather, God Bless His Soul, was a peasant’s son from the hills of Jaca, in Spain, a displaced soldier from the Pyrenees who never returned to his cursed hills. Yes, he missed Jaca’s barren mountains and the drunken wine brawls that contaminated his stint as a barman in a neighboring mountain town, Aretxabaleta! The old man hated Cavite’s lushness, the gleaming untouched Bay. Ah—Jaca. Now there was a town for you! People in Jaca broke their backs for grain to grow! They waited four years for the next rain! You think your lives are miserable? Hah! People do not understand life if they do not know how it was in Jaca!
I myself dream of going to Jaca one day, not to mention the red wines of the mystical village, Aretxabaleta!
For his oldest son to become a scholar, not a soldier, that was unfortunate—but to be with actors and demonios, that was dumb.
It was the second son, my uncle, Tio U., who kept the peace. He’s the hero of this story. When my uncle was born, no one noticed his awkward head, a family trait, or the vague look of his soulful eyes. Except for his feeble eyes, he bore nothing from his father, who knocked furniture over in blind rages.
My gentle uncle watched the rampage, with useless shame.
My gentle uncle followed in his brother el genio Jote’s footsteps, but he never caught up. He didn’t have the guts, the stamina, or the katsila nose. His was a bit bulbous, more like a hill than a monument. But el genio Jote shared his adventures with his brother. He took his little brother to the dances, the fencing matches, the debates. The younger boy read the books el genio Jote read. My uncle even memorized my father’s speeches, not knowing they were generous helpings from the letters of Montaigne. In the end, it made sense: priesthood became my uncle’s calling—the vicarious life.
The brothers’ paths forked.
The university kicked my father out, but my uncle succeeded, in his own way. He was no trailblazer. Tio U. took the synodal exam and patiently waited for the results. They gave him a small parish, San Felipe. It was really just a cul-de-sac, and he was only an assistant, a coadjutor, though his grade could have made him curate. But he never complained. “Not everyone can be Burgos,” he said with a hint of bitterness. (Yes, he meant the famous canon of the bishopric of Manila, May He Rest In Peace!) He liked his church because from the windows you could look out on the Bay.126
I would like to conclude this essay to explain once and for all that my uncle did not encourage the soldiers of San Felipe to riot. Tio U. took care of me when my father left. It pains me to hear the slander. Beat me up again, but my uncle the padre is no filibustero.127 How could he turn traitor? He was a scaredy-cat. He could never be a man like my Papá, his brother. He didn’t have the spirit, the gonads, you know—huevos. That’s just his character. He’s a man of God. Why would he disguise himself in a priest’s outfit128 129 130 and incite insurrection in Burgos’s name? He was a man of faith in more ways than one. Yes, he met Burgos—but who hadn’t, in the narrow alleyways (and I use the word narrow with double senses!) of that college they attended? He did think Padre Burgos was a bit—tense. Too wound up. A northerner, you know: Tio U. was uncomfortable with the type.131 132 But the Guardia Civil knew they were wrong to lock my uncle up. As proof—the court returned to Tio U. his material goods (what was not torn and burned) and his land. (True, he had to retire and never got the parish of his desire, Kawit, but that’s not his fault.) Now he lives a quiet life taking care of his old father, the Spanish veterano, basking in the good esteem of his peasant neighbors, for whom he writes letters and interprets canon law. I rest my case. The End.
126 The hero’s early identification with the conservative, God-fearing uncle is typical of a child’s sentimental progress—later, Raymundo’s shift from devout nephew to agnostic radical is not so different from modern-day Manila teenagers, who might wake up Opus Dei one morning and turn Maoist by nightfall, give or take a few strolls along EDSA. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
127 After the Cavite Mutiny, suspected subversives (filibusteros) were under surveillance, but life became normal. For instance, future Katipunan general Don Mariano Alvarez, implicated in the Mutiny, became town mayor of Noveleta (his son Santiago became Raymundo’s pal at the Latinidad de Jose Basa). Don Jose Basa, once exiled to Guam, returned to establish a famous private school of (lame) secondary education. Don Jorge Raymundo Mata, a.k.a. el genio Jote, the hero’s father, was hunted down because he was one of Burgos’s compares, part of his barkada, so to speak—the Guardia Civil being unaware that he was really only a bad dramatist. After the Mutiny, el genio Jote never returned to Kawit. It’s said that he remained incognito in the mountains of Maragondon, allegedly a lithe, cross-dressing bandit. All records—plus vicious rumor—seem to indicate, however, that his flight may have been—well—flighty, occasioned not by filibusterismo but cervantismo, romantic grief. But in the 1890s, the legend of the revolutionary bandit, el genio Jote, took on a certain glamor among Caviteños. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
128 As noted, a prominent rumor was that, to frame the genius Filipino canon Padre Burgos, scheming friars bribed another Filipino of Spanish descent to disguise himself as a priest in the hours leading to the revolt and so implicate native clergy as conspirators in the soldiers’ riot. The similarity to the plot of trumped-up conspiracy in Rizal’s novel, El Filibusterismo, is not coincidental; the “decoy episode” is also a favorite of fine fin-de-siecle melodramas, including my favorites, Sherlock Holmes mysteries and the anarchist novels of Eugène Sue. Raymundo categorically refutes that his uncle was that decoy Filipino priest of Spanish descent. The Mystery of the Cavite Mutiny’s Unknown Curate is unsolved to this day. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
129 Conspiracy theories, also known as outbreaks of paranoid-schizophrenia in the public realm, are symptoms of meltdown in a diseased society. Conspiracy theories abounded in both camps—Spaniards believed all filibusteros were evil Masons and native clergy were all subversives. Filipinos believed that every Spaniard was out to get them. Of course, the Spaniards were out to get them, but the fact that the substance of Filipino paranoia was true is not the point. The psychoanalytic historian’s concern is that the patient (colonial Filipino society) acquired an obsessive pathology, symptom of trauma. To cure it of paranoia’s lingering effects need not require rooting out paranoia itself (a symptom that may never go away, even when the direct cause, the Spaniards, are gone, which, of course, proves pathology) for “freedom is cognition in a cage” [Mürk, Exercises IV]. The cure is ceaseless analysis, which may simply be the burden of being alive. As for the paranoia of the tyrant: power is an illness not even constitutional amendments can cure. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Zurich, Switzerland)
130 Nonsense! The Philippines is not a patient, and you, Dr. Frankenstein, are no nurse. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
131 It’s true Burgos was a northerner: from Vigan, Ilocos Sur. But like Raymundo’s Tio U., Burgos was the son of a Spanish militiaman and a Filipina mestiza—one-eighth “Filipino,” if you want to be meticuloso about it. Burgos, a mestizo like the hero Raymundo Mata, literally threw in his lot with his motherland—his mother’s country. Something to think about. The rebellion of the mestizo world, as Filipinos call its hybrid society of mixed souls riven by colonizers—mulatto or Creole being alien phrases—marks the trauma of this revolt. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
132 On the other hand, hybridity is the violent lot of history. Cf., Frederick Douglass, or Homer A. Plessy. (Dr. Diwata Drake, New Orleans, LA)