Entry #20
Dear Q—,
Until now I am not forgetting the labor of yours, that on waking at morning is your rising with litheness, your making the cross, your getting on knees and praising God, thanking him that you he kept from common danger . . . God is the first sound from your lips, the first thought of yours.
I see your form enchanting, the kindness and modesty that is shining through your walk and your entire conduct, that is seen in your churchgoing and your listening to the sacred sacrifice.
Today I see that your bosom is open, and I gaze at your clean heart, that is following the sacrament to which you are boiling the rice with full love, the God of love that you hold in your hand, that offers to the powerful Father remembrance, respect for his high power that He is wielding over the world . . . 257 258 259
Until now I do not forget your industry,260 how you wake in the morning and at once rise with eagerness, with the sign of the cross, genuflecting and praising God, thanking him for keeping you from harm and giving you life to serve his love on that morning and every morning God is the first sound on your lips as God is your first thought.
I see your charming figure, the goodness and grace that shines through in your walk and your whole demeanor, as when you sit in church and listen wide-eyed to the Sacred Sacrifice. Now I see how your heart is open and I look at your pure soul, and what is that which you hold in your hand—it is the God of Love—throbbing with high power that He wields over the world—and to which you offer your remembrance and honor.
What is that which you hold in your hands—a god of love throbbing with power, the majesty he wields over the world—to which, in my dreams, you offer tender memory and respect. I keep seeing your bodice open, your pure chest, rising and falling,261 262 as you sit in my church, wide-eyed, mouthing a holy sacrifice. Now I see your enchanting form, your goodness and grace shining through your gestures, your shy walk towards me.
Why should God be the first sound on your lips and the first thought in your heart? Open the day, Q—,266 in another way. Your holy gestures are wasted, eagerness lost on air: making the cross, genuflecting, sighing and thanking—a Ghost. Think of a different Body—that which sighs, thanks, kneels, and rises up in eagerness: to be with you, double-you. Your charming body, grace and goodness in your entire demeanor, your shy walk. Walk towards me. Bless me, E—. Be good to me, R—. T—, shed your grace. Oh Y—, why not?
Until now I think of your industry, your litheness, as you get up and grasp it as you would the cross—lateral and literal benediction; then you genuflect, you pray, you kneel, o dios, the first words on your lips (you lick your lips), o dios, the first thought on your mind (you close your eyes).
It’s like church: a holy sacrifice. You the devout devour the mass by heart, the pauses, parts, and breaths, the unspeakable and righteous act. You shame the grace of an angel, you fit the form of shyness, as you hold it, the god of love, in your hands . . . 267
257 Raymundo shifts to pure Tagalog for no clear reason in this unfinished paragraph. This formal language, quite different from the casual language of the early entries of Part I, occurs nowhere else in the text and is reproduced below. Raymundo’s original, in straight, stylized Tagalog with hispanized spellings and the Tagalog’s trademark verbal indirection, full of Predicates but no Subjects and too many Gerunds reads (and I translated literally and faithfully above):
“Magpahanga ñgayo’y, di co nalilimutan ang casipagan mo, na pagca guising sa umaga’y, malicsing babañgon, sasandatahin ang cruz, maninicluhod ca’t, magpupuri sa Dios, magpapasalamat at iniadya ca sa madlang pañganib at pinagcalooban nang buhay na ipaglilingcód sa caniyang camahalan sa arao na iyon Dios ang unang bigcás nang labi mo, at palibhasa’y Dios ang unang isip mo.
Aquing natatanao ang cauili-uiling anyó mo, ang cabaita’t, cahinhinan na nagniningning sa iyong paglacad at boong caasalan, na ipinaquiquita sa pagtuñgo sa simbahan, at ipinaqui-quinyig nang Santo Sacrificio. Ñgayo’y, naqui-quita cong bucás ang dibdib mo, at natatanao co ang malinis mong puso, na naquiquibagay sa sacerdote na inihahain mo nang boong pagibig, ang Dios nang pagibig na hauac sa camay, at iniaalay sa di matingcalang Ama, alaala’t, galang sa mataas niyang capangyarihan, na ipinag-hahari sa sangdaigdigan.” (Trans. Note)
258 Mimi C.! This literal overlay of Tagalog’s gerund-orientation onto English syntax is an astonishing commentary on the ordinary anguish of translation—or its impossibility. Almost as bad as Nabokov’s unreadable Eugene Onegin, your “translation” willfully ignores rules of English to give Tagalog’s verbalism its prominence. This is an inversion of the norms of translation—when originalism is the goal, not clarity. Versions of the self, as one can see from any “translated” text, are thus often subversions: if it’s in language we reveal our Self to an Other, we are mutated, broken, mis-presented when we code-switch, in our attempt to be heard. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Clyde, Ohio)
259 Mimi C.! Goddamnit, do your job already: be polite! I just want to understand: if you need English, use English. (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Institute and Sanatorium, Tacloban, Leyte)
260 This second passage seems a tentative translation, in Spanish, of the first, except that towards the end, once again, Raymundo surrenders to juvenile vulgarity, which I deplore. These pages could be a copybook: a diligent, schoolboy exercise. These are among the last of the diarist’s gestational pages, that is, birth-language pangs of this memoir. (Trans. Note)
261 Raymundo, now situated in markedly bourgeois, collegiate society, hive of the colonial metropole, pictures the “pure” woman, virginal, genuflecting: a lady with no trace of a vagina. Quite a contrast with the largesse of good, provincial Señora Chula. This is the image, a feeble idolatry damaging to all women, that urbane nineteenth-century writers perfected into inanition in characters such as Rizal’s vacuous Maria Clara. In Raymundo, we have revolution in another guise. His peculiarly hybrid tongue—provincial and metropolitan, regional and Tagalog—liberates him as he attempts to violate catatonic modesty inherited from Christian virtue. Good for him. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Clyde, Ohio)
262 Yes, Dr. Diwata, but should his revolutionary eye do so at the expense of her heaving chest? Oh, it’s not that I object to radical desire, but pity the suffering of translators—their damned conspiracy with masculine ways! This is the trouble with translation—I keep getting entangled in crimes of the patriarchy, especially in these sections of romantic dalliance in the nineteenth century that populate his adolescent journals. So on top of that, the risqué hero challenges the orthodoxy with vulgarity, so that not only his grammar but also his acts are flecked with misogyny, leavened by (rape-like) passion. (Trans. Note)
263 Not to mention, Mimi C., his demonic incursions here on the good manners and right conduct of Urbana and Feliza, the Emilies Post of nineteenth-century Manila. The epistolary form and especially the obsolete Tagalog used in the beginning allude to texts on manners such as Pagsusulatan ng Dalawang Binibini na si Urbana at Feliza (Letters between Two Women, Urbana and Feliza, 1864), etc. But Raymundo is no gentleman! Bastos! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
264 Dear Estrella, your own allusion, i.e., to the Victorian etiquette guru Emily Post, presents a lovely dilemma in these footnotes. For after all, Urbana and Feliza antedate the annoying Posts. Some would say your charming recidivism, the use of Western allusion to punctuate your patriotism, marks your subjective richness: the world is your oyster, and you devour it with a plate of salt. In our indiscriminate age, you and I have traversed the colonial and back. We eat the world raw at our own risk, colonial subjects one moment, voracious master of many cultures the next. This is our wealth, our privilege. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Baltimore, Maryland)
265 Emily Post-It that, bruja. Speak for yourself. I eat oysters with kalamansi—not salt! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
266 Various letters of the alphabet are scattered in this entry with the randomness of letterpress types crowding a printer’s drawer. These were leaden metals in which the alphabet retained an obdurate physicality: what was it like when you could hold the phantom phoneme, like a heavy key, in your hand? (Trans. Note)
267 Pagsusulatan ng Dalawang Binibini na si Urbana at Feliza was an etiquette and morality manual. This is anything but. Raymundo writes a rapturous (rapist!) love note, addressing anonymous virgins to make much of time. I repeat: Bastos! (Estrella Espejo, ditto)