Afterword

By Estrella Espejo

I would like to express my gratitude to Raymundo Mata and his heirs. It’s a miracle—I mean, a miracle happened to me. Capital M! If you recall, there I was, falling into necrotic sleep and inertia, a familiar nightmare when I contemplate the history of my country. My spleen was twitching beneath my ribcage like a poisoned bantam chicken, and I was swooning into horror. My ganglia and gorge, my nerves and nasal hoar—I was shaking toward that fatal torpor, a malaise I know so well—not just of the body, but of desire, of memory and mind.

Oh country, oh fate!

When suddenly apprehension broke, like a fever.

What I apprehended was this: it was the voice of History.

It spoke.

I swear it was him, Raymundo Mata, a trembling lisp of a nation’s desire. Arise, Estrella Espejo, he said as I lay prone in my bed, breathing through a plastic apparatus. You hold in your hand the mirror of your race. (To be honest, maybe he said “face,” I could barely hear through the inhaler, and my ear, stricken with the same old abysmal abasia, long-dormant, still has its problems. Anyway, as I said, he had a lisp.)

But his pitiable message was unmistakable.

You must publish or perish, he said. This is a monumental paean to History. When the word is made flesh, he breathed: you will be well.

Sure enough, I have been sitting up in bed for days, eating special bibingka from Hotel Alejandro, not needing my lugaw, and soon I will be leaving this haven on Magsaysay Boulevard, this trap, this refuge, and even now am scribbling ideas for a new paper on my findings in the manuscript, this blind man’s history of the revolution.

Who knows: maybe it is true. One day I will be well.

 

I would like to express my gratitude therefore to Raymundo Mata and his heirs.

This work is a monumental paean to History. It encompasses (through limited means and blurry vision, it is true) a sweep of time otherwise slipped under a rug. The two mysteries Raymundo Mata unlocks, with his signature modesty and aplomb, foreground two serious gaps in our knowledge. The first, the key to the mystery of the Katipunan’s lost cash, long a bone of contention among now deceased rebels (may they rest in peace in the unjust oblivion of their tombs), will enliven business among certain sections between Tandang Sora and Balara—perhaps the same motley stampede of optimists still looking for General Yamashita’s gold.

The second, the mystery of the hero’s last hour in Dapitan, has occupied the memories of that town’s pious folk for more than a century and enamored armchair dramatists of more prurient dispositions for years (but intermittently, given the nature of our attention span). It’s a passage in history that has always moved me, it brings pangs beyond my capacity to diagnose, or quell—that description of Rizal’s last moments in Dapitan before leaving on the steamer España that would take him (he supposed) to a free man’s post as a doctor to the Spanish troops in Cuba. (We know that instead he ended up in the overnight travesty of a windowless cell at Barcelona’s Montjuic Fortress—incidentally, the same cell occupied three decades later by Lluis Companys, the condemned president of Catalonia, as Orwell must have reported in his Homage. As Rizal himself said—perhaps with bitter sacrilege—of his saga in 1896: “This is but the First Station.”)

A British biographer of Rizal, the astute Austin Coates, writes of that brief moment in Dapitan in his book Rizal—Filipino Nationalist and Patriot:

 

In the afternoon of . . . 31 July, nearly the whole town of Dapitan walked and boated to Talisay to bid farewell . . . He came to a window of his house to find the people gathered in hundreds outside beneath the trees, the elders of the town, their wives and families, indeed everyone in Dapitan with the exception of the priests . . . On a flat-topped rock beside the sea the town band, pride of Dapitan, had installed themselves to take their part, too, serenading him on his way.

“He came down the steps of the house, made his adieux, and with the whole gathering walked down toward the shore. The boat in which he was to be rowed out to the steamer was waiting, the band was waiting.

“But he did not at once embark. Bidding no one follow him, he mounted the rib of the hill leading to the kiosk, symbol of his personal life in his own country, and stood for a few seconds deep in thought. Then, striking a match, he set fire to it. Within a few seconds it was a mass of flames. Turning away and never glancing back, he came swiftly to the boat and embarked.

 

Any reader would be no less struck as the entire town of Dapitan was struck—a whole mystery of families and gaping citizens—by Rizal’s final puzzling gesture in what turned out to be his final home. Not even the hero was to know (though he may have guessed) that these fateful people, on that crosswise slipper of land, that spill of rock and abaca, would be the incidental witness of his ultimo adios. (It is this moment that the ashen imagery of his celebrated poem merely postdates.) To the people of Dapitan, the riddle of his actions seemed both tender and disturbing: it provoked years of pity and bereavement in the townsfolk’s memory.

And now it is through the unearthed diaries of Raymundo Mata that one might find a slim shard of understanding—as of the Magdalene explaining Jesus’s acts (but only in the haze, of course, of his posthumous glory).

That the tomb of the stillborn child, his son, lay under the kiosk’s kindling—yes, the people of Dapitan have long held that ceaseless view, with the kind of tact and appropriate gravity no other place in this avid archipelago has been able to muster, as there are only two things that unite Filipinos: gossip, and the life of Jose Rizal.

But that the secret kiosk on the rib of the hill—long ago smelling of lanzones coil, a site yet to be fully determined even to this day, so say the curators of the estate—surely contained the other strangled child (no less terrible a death, and for some perhaps more terrible, for after all books are immortal while children break your heart), few have gleaned.

Rizal’s ritual act of burning recalls the burning of the fictive Crisostomo Ibarra’s study—of Ibarra’s own history and letters—in the town of San Diego, in that text that some consider the precursor of the hero’s myriad biographies: the prophetic Noli Me Tangere. The hero, in those last moments of his innocence, believed in Dapitan he was also burning a book. And in his Orphic angst, not taking a backward look, he understood he was burning not only the child of his loins—in burning the book, so burned his spirit.

Fortunately for the history of Filipinos, that book, unknown to Rizal, was already absent from its tomb. How was he to know that an obscure crook— blind, impulsive, and ridiculous—had purloined his text from its dusty grave? Only the flat-topped rock, fortunately mute, in Dapitan remembers the shadow of the crime.

(In my case, I will always recall with affection the image of the budding larcenist meditating on that flat rock in this memoir’s pages: the memoirist’s haunting solitude as he gazed down on the ocean’s blank page.)

Nowhere in the recollections of the hero’s family or of the wise men of Dapitan does it appear that Rizal worked again at the kiosk after the death of his child. There lay undisturbed the twin ghosts of his genius. The hero’s numerous letters, postcards, and other ephemera ascertain that he never discovered, or at least spoke of, the manuscript’s loss. And so it is that the Philippines owes to the perfidy of that nightblind thief Raymundo Mata the preservation of what one might call a limb of its patrimony—or maybe some other organ: a distorted lens, a partial eye.

The actual state of the hero’s manuscript—as preserved here in a circular loop, with same beginning and no end, in bits and unfettered pieces, promiscuous and confusing, an omnivorous mad shedding of words, as of some kind of ecdysiast eccentric taking off all her clothes without much ado—is not for me, a mere historian, to evaluate. I leave that to literary upholsterers and cultural quacks: those critics and amateur hypnotists whose words must inevitably follow.