Entry #21
Number 17, Calle Magallanes, from October 1886
I was a poor student. My years in the cockpit at San Roque did not prepare me for this new world of the city. I was only good at spelling. Because I have a weird mind, the priests said, like a letterpress. My Latin was so-so, but my Spanish was terrible despite all those nights spent reading. Turns out, I read books without thinking, only for the feeling, the way words strike my soul; I should have examined their tenses, their syntax, the exceptions to the rules! Who cares if it’s true that Don Quixote de la Mancha suffered like Christ—if I wrote the esdrújula without an accent, I should be punished. I counted with pleasure the slaps on the forearm, the stings in the palm, all my transgressions whipped out of me. Yes, yes, take them away, my errors, my base conjugations! Let my welts swell up—the pus of lapsus—the easier for me to caress my wounds, stigmata of learning. Somehow it heightened the thrill of knowing—that I learned the masculine nature of all Greek words through lashings and earned the subjunctive case with my own blood.
I practiced my lessons everywhere. Riding the carriages, walking home, I looked for exercises of my prowess, grammar gymnastics. I translated songs, even conversations, in my head. I copied out whole sections of books in Spanish. Even the most boring, the numbing novenas, the etiquette manuals. I enjoyed the act of copying, rounding out words in my own hand, finding out verbs in the act, sprung from the cages of their conjugations. I translated Tagalog into Spanish, and once, just for fun, Spanish into Tagalog (an ad, I think, for a Minerva press, and I added a drawing, too, a piece of pleasant pulchritude I embellished extravagantly in art class). Soon enough I progressed. And I remember that day when Father Baltazar, an oratorical mollusk with languid limbs, instead of throwing the book at me, grunted, with a kind of animal surprise, when I declaimed—backwards!—the imperfect subjunctive of the verb matar in perfect simulation of his own screech. Tu mataras . . . él matara . . . ¡espero que yo te haya matado!268 269 I gained thirty-two lashes instead of the usual octuple for my flawless display. Who knows what would have happened if not for the insuperable pedantry of Father Baltazar?
I understood then the sinful triumph of suffering for pride, not ignorance.
I slept well that night (as long as I did not touch my forearms, which throbbed from knowledge). Even now my skin flushes, my beard trembles, when I remember my victory, the look of admiration, albeit violent, in the invertebrate priest’s eyes.
That look occurred spasmodically among my professors, I recall.
The next year, when I was no longer in his class, scholarly Father Baltazar would greet me in the hallway with that gaze of an epicanthic worm, a look that on his part passed for affection, and I, always taken aback, would mumble Salve and rush on to my next class.
In Physics and Mathematics, on the other hand, I was only so-so. In Biology I had fun with nomenclature, in particular, and other aspects of taxonomy. In music I was a dunce.
I remember Father Melchior because he reminded me of fish in my hometown—a plump shiny mackerel,270 with fat funhouse flesh glistening with grease. Everyone said he was an “invert,” but a jolly good one he was, whatever an invert was. Free with the ferrule but judicious with praise, he taught me drama, and it was like some animal stirring in me, a sleeping asp or hibernating cobra, that the Spanish plays aroused, and I possessed an organic alertness, a weirdly physical response, to the scenes of dying courtesans, masked bandits, epicurean buffoons, and polyglot witches that populated that dreamlike course. In truth I was happy to leave that class when the term was done—so disconcerting was that feeling of fervid love for things that had no right to be familiar, as if I were in heaven, or some alternate place of damned repose.
But the enduring influence was Father Gaspar. He was the only indio,271 a pathetic sycophant when the need arose—hence his tenure in that space, enlightened in some areas but, let’s face it, narrow in the ways that matter. At the time I did not appreciate his timidity, the way among masters infinitely inferior to him in intellect Father Gaspar played the second-rate fool, a brown, skinny Sancho Panza and receiver of their vicious jokes. He taught first-year Latin, his skills dooming him to the illumination of principles in the Doctrina Cristiana. I must say, the required material of his skimpy syllabus flattened his genius. But I learned under his pious indulgence to return to childish reverie and recall the past (short as it was; I was only seventeen). We repeated all the lessons of the Latinidad272 273 in a single term, and with each prayer re-learnt I reviewed entire childhood episodes along with Latin declensions: there were so many hours for daydreaming in that redundant class I could have written this autobiography274 several times over, in the genitive, the ablative, the infinitive, ad infinitum. I learned later that Father Gaspar was writing a dictionary of ichthyology, his field of expertise, being from a southern island, but so far he had only reached abalone. Even his personal life was a shambles. But there was something about this priest, with his truncated talent and wistful look, that recalled to me the inside of certain clams: he was a washed-out shell. It’s not for his lessons that I owe Father Gaspar my . . .275
268 You killed . . . he killed . . . I hope that I have killed you!: shout-out to Raymundo’s killer name, an elegant catenation of grammar and desire. (Trans. Note)
269 Grammar and desire: language’s unconscious threat yoked to the explicit plot here of language acquisition. A frisson occurs in the text from that most delicious of couplings: when the conscious and unconscious both speak the hero’s name: ¡espero que yo te haya Mata-do! Part 1 of these diaries has exposed Raymundo’s primal texts. In Part 2, Raymundo begins his switch to the Master’s tongue. Education is the double-edged sword in histories of colonies, but most especially the getting of the Master’s Word, rape and reward both, benefit/bane: what gives us speech kills, thus we are. Language-acquisition becomes this Gordian knot in what seems an insoluble puzzle of identity. In the Greek legend of the knot, for King Gordius of Phrygia and Alexander the Great the reward for untying is dominion over Asia. Alexander the Great, in the consummate simplicity that marks the monster, simply cut the knot with his sword. It’s a cliché to wail, There is no Alexander’s sword for the knot of colonial language. The colonized endlessly confronts the wound of identity, and dominion over Asia will ever be deferred. But what if one just Becomes the Monster—just cut that knot with the umbilical sword, and so admit with Mürkian calm that fixed identity you seek is an illusion anyhow—Master or Servant, none of us cohere and all of us are fractured by a gaping lack? And so a terrible bemusement—that the state of the colonized is the state of all—beguiles our waking hours. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Galatia, Turkey)
270 Una caballa brillante . . . rechoncha . . . cuyas es camas esperpénticas . . . relucen con grasa: here, Raymundo’s Spanish is spotted with awkward phrases—it’s like translating a symbolist on speed. (Trans. Note)
271 Spanish caste terms are particularly troubling for a translator of nineteenth-century Filipino society. Filipino, the term that stems from the mongrel multiplicity of a fantastic history, did not exist then as we know it; it is a post-revolutionary spoil. In Raymundo’s time, people were coded not only by how much Spanish blood they had in their veins but by where and how they got that blood. Peninsulares (from Europe) were Spaniards born in Spain: highest caste. Insulares were Spaniards born in the islands: also called Filipinos. Indio is how Spaniards denoted all Filipinos without Spanish blood: an ignorant and pejorative solecism, transported from their errors in America. So what then should a translator do? Take on the Spanish prejudice by using the denotative term “indio”? Or translate it colloquially as “Filipino”? A tragic agon of colonial pain lies dramatized in quotation marks. I took the path of least resistance and just footnoted. (Trans. Note)
272 As noted, at the latinidades, such as at San Roque, pupils were taught only Latin, a dead language, as if Spanish were some kind of hidden mystical key to a garden barred from them, and Latin was its barbed wire—landmine of learning. Having learnt the power of education from their colonies in the Americas, Spain did not systematically teach its language in the islands, though novels and magazines proliferated in Spanish, and there is evidence that Raymundo, a savant, gleaned a jumbled heap of meanings from his random youthful readings, from books scattered about by his wily uncle. A refreshing quality of novelty imbues Raymundo’s prose here—his sudden transport into a living world of words, of comprehension with bright leaves. It is to be noted that a central demand of the shortlived, if not shortsighted, Filipino Propaganda Movement (1880–1895) was, oddly enough, the teaching of Spanish in public schools. (Estrella Espejo, ditto)
273 Isn’t it easy for us to call the Propaganda Movement “shortsighted,” rather than one in a continuum of a nation’s progress? As if the flaws of the U.S. Articles of Confederation, e.g., were destiny, not contingency. “Nationhood” arises in jerky motions—more akin to awkward crablike lunges, sometimes backward or sideways, at times forward—and we pat ourselves on the back or claw at our wounds with the prosthetics of hindsight. When no nation is ever so prescient, or exceptional. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Philadelphia, PA)
274 Material evidence suggests that various fragments of this journal were written—or conceived—years before his stay in Bilibid jail where Raymundo was last seen in public, under the custody of the Stars and Stripes. My tendency is to view each section as psychologically true to its chronological placement, though the circumstances of its collation—whether or not Raymundo had time and energy to revise, redact, embellish these tracts years later, as Dr. Diwata has suggested—is matter for future scholars’ endeavors. (Trans. Note)
275 Like many of these college entries, unfinished. (Trans. Note)