An Epitaph
By Dr. Diwata Drake
Excuse me for my long silence.
I was reading.
I have been re-reading The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. I encourage you all to do the same. Sure, the beginning is a tatter of mangled texts, all of which one could skip without anxiety (although I daresay without them the rest would not exist). And then there’s the matter of the leaning tower of commentary, so that the document seems not one but two—or who knows three: one a waspish intertext of witches, another a disarmed combatant’s confession of misadventure, and yet another (the most revolutionary document of them all, perhaps) the abominable pulsing void in which the intramural wrangling and all that awful mess, the pasticciaccio brutto of voices, intersect and must converge.
But one clue among the excursions of the translator, Ms. Mimi C., led me on a chase, and in the last few weeks I’ve had to drop the usual effusions of theory, and even praxis. My own unfinished work, now titled, Why, You Lovely Symptoms: The Structure of the Filipino Unconscious, Not Really Lang(ue), or Even a Parol(e), has been abandoned.
I’ve worked as a detective.
I found a few wild geese, a bronze, or at least mestizo-type golden fleece, and some cut-up kusing, plus one centavo. In short, I’ve picked up stray cues (or should I use a fishy metaphor instead?) from the trail of little red herring left by this monumental paean to History, as my esteemed colleague Professor Estrella Espejo puts it.
The fossil evidence of Raymundo’s words, especially the conclusive Entry #46, seems to indicate a curious interlacing of the blind hero’s memoir with the ophthalmologist’s third novel. It is as if the doctor-savior and patient-crook were looped (Estrella’s words, not mine), tangled in knots of each other.
I congratulate Estrella on her reprieve from history: I hope it lasts. However, Estrella accepts the ghostly state of the text with too much goodwill (I only hope the voice she heard was figurative).
In her last passage, she seems to concede, without directly saying so, that Raymundo’s memoir and the hero’s third novel are one.
Without questioning at all the oddness of her point, its vertiginous trap, she . . . accepts that Raymundo, that ecdysiast eccentric, has taken on the emperor’s clothes, so to speak—and thus Rizal’s naked bones, that is, his sentences, lie like a dark fitted overcoat upon Raymundo’s memoir, a circular loop, with same beginning and no end.
She does not bother to disentangle one from the other.
Various scholars have already argued the pros and cons of the two conclusions that instantly arose when advance copies of this text were indiscriminately mailed out by an anonymous crank (I had nothing to do with it). I shall not go into the ideological specifics of the scholars’ tirades but will gloss on a few points.
One: certain renegade Rizalists, alleged escapees from Mount Banahaw, argue that the “loop” in Entry #46 tells us this—Raymundo Mata of Kawit’s memoir is part of the lost third novel of the hero, as told in the Minerva press sheets rolled out by the young curate’s nephew, Ysagani. To these devout and balding apostates, Raymundo Mata’s memoir is a text within Rizal’s recently discovered novel Makamisa, or After the Mass.
One of these escaped Rizalists, perhaps driven a bit deranged by his own lost years on the mountain, has gone so far as to declare: the memoir is the lost third novel.
If so, Rizal in his last days turns out to be a sore parodist; ventriloquist to a purloiner and, perhaps, a rapist but also, oddly, a rampant plagiarist of himself; clearly a heretic against his Jesuit God; and a bit inattentive when it comes to plot. This rather modern Rizal, I must say, has his admirers, among them a coterie from Queens, New York, who lists a number of “postcursors” of Rizal, such as the hero of the Frenchman Raymond Queneau’s The Blue Flowers, and one sentence in a paragraph about bat wings in a story by the late symbolist Franz Arcellana.
The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is seductive because it implies resurrection, which is a desire that unites all humans, even those who are not Filipinos. Somehow in this memoir a lost novel rises from its grave, and with it its author. The execution of Rizal by the Spaniards (curiously omitted from Raymundo’s plot530), the eternity of the hero’s pathos and injustice, has perpetrated all too many deceits and delusions in his countrymen—and I am not just referring to the sectarians of Banahaw, although they are a special case.
The many seances and tableaux calling up the ghost of Rizal are innumerable in the Philippines, his child-republic, which seems to exist only as a remorseful postscript to his name: the monuments in the plaza of every single town in the country, the sad caricature on the matchbooks (the absurd hairline, the fine mustache), the yearly bouts of remembrance that dissuade no violent tyrant and soothe no one’s daily woes—in these images is the hero reproduced by a desperate country, an ironic denouement for a stubborn man who left not a single trace of the ashes of his own son’s grave.
The more vehement critics, those who man the barricades of truth, a numerous tribe, curse the renegade Rizalists and say: pwe! The mere notion that the text can in any way be attributed to the noble and long-suffering poet sickens these scholars.
The travesty is Raymundo Mata’s alone, they chorus: he has desecrated and appropriated Rizal beyond forbearance. The “loop” in Entry #46 is brazen proof of Raymundo Mata’s horrible sacrilege, his tampering and revision of a holy text. He dares to enlace his own words—interpolate his vile witticisms—with Jose Rizal’s! Que verguenza, not to mention barbaridad. It means nothing to these scholars that in doing so Raymundo Mata the thief, that Barabbas, recovered the lost novel and, however feloniously, resurrected the hero. That last fact only adds to Raymundo’s errors.
To these diocesan faithful, this text commits a crime punishable by death (in any case, Raymundo Mata seems to have vanished in time, derelict and hallucinating, water-tortured but somehow sublime, in that cell in Bilibid, under the custody of American G.I.s, so that takes care of that). To these fastidious readers, this memoir, this fantasy, is cousin to all other vibrant forgeries and textual ambiguities that have plagued this fervid democracy’s highly imaginative history: e.g., the sadistic delusions of the prehispanic Code of Kalantiaw, a bunch of bark documents wrapped in wax, written in cuttlefish ink, and stuffed in the horn of a six-legged bull; the laborious stenography of the Minutes of the Katipunan, cursed by an over-earnest, too-detailed banality; the ignoble contretemps over the ignominious so-called Retraction of Rizal, in which the hero allegedly confesses in his last hour his return to God, like some poor modern Chaucer—a spurious document perpetrated (so the scholars say) by no less than the Archbishop of Manila and the head of the Jesuit order; Aguinaldo’s apocryphal writ commuting the death sentence of Bonifacio, smacking more of wish-fulfilment than fact; and the still-disputed translation by Bonifacio of Rizal’s posthumous poem found in a lamp, Mi Ultimo Adios (but anyway, they add, who cares—what matters is that the translation was memorized, word for word, and gave the rebels heart).
The list of textual deceptions underlines without a doubt the eternal trauma of the Philippines: like everyone else, it is a contingent being, born of words.
And it soothes none that their own flagrant sense of self is perhaps recast in the miracle of Raymundo’s language, in the strange way that words conversely enact magic tricks of being.
But as for me, I have no wish to deny Raymundo’s story.
Indeed, I prefer to give him ballast.
I hope, I fervently desire, to give witness to his truth.
I know. I know.
You know.
That there is a shadow on my cheek, a wisp of a pinch and a palm on the face, along with the breeze of the beach (in Antibes) that perhaps surges with this desire—
I admit my own personal regret: the way I failed to follow my folly, my love, Pedro Ménårdsz, who prophecied as he escaped with his minions from the just wrath of Claro Mürk—
It is the world of words that desires the world of things.
As I said, I have combed through The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, I have retraced and retrod and gone through clues like Edgar Allan Poe’s Prefect G— (to recall the allusions of Mata himself).
I have come to some troubling conclusions.
Among my (hundreds of) clues are the following, to wit: the use of English in Entry #36; the names lifted from Rizal’s student diary in Entry #19; the entire section on Lady K in Entry #22; a mysterious signal of textual finality, consummatum est, in the middle of narration in Entry #23; and the faithful translation into English (from the Spanish) of fol. 57 of Makamisa, as found in Entry #46. There is one interesting, provocative statement, a line in Entry #21, in which the hero cryptically declares: I enjoyed the act of copying; but in that case I may be overreading. (I’m not even going to mention the soup of other texts that indelibly stained this memoir, from balagtasan to bugtong—all of which otherwise sustain the Filipino soul.)
Each of these clues shares a linguistic deviltry, an almost incandescent reflexive trickery—the kind perpetrated by agile liars, or translators.
I wish to call on the single witness of the actual text—the sole reader of the so-called original papers of the memoir: the Translator.
Mimi C.—where are you?
As our correspondence reached a climax, I tried calling upon her in person, Googling her address and phone number, but in vain. Has she fled the country? The publisher Trina Trono keeps her itinerary under wraps, stalls whenever I try to get at least her cell so I can text her, and now refuses to return my calls (and then my server keeps sending back “undeliverable mail”); all this even as Trina Trono graciously extends full support for this publication—since pretty soon she can pocket its modest profits.
The translator’s hoax—yes, I use the word boldly, Mimi C., wherever you are—only stokes the fires of a cruel illusion:
That a nation so conceived, from the existential exigencies of a young man’s first novel, will find redemption in the phoenix of his lost words.
And if so her enterprise preserves the country’s painful paradox: it is full of writers who believe a text will save it, even when they know barely anyone will read it. (Perhaps this explains her effrontery.)
And so I demand in the name of Raymundo Mata: habeas corpus.
Give us the body.
It is the Translator, Mimi C., alone who can answer the questions of the critics. Where are the original papers?
True, there is one reader out there, a voice in the wilderness, who has already declared with the ardor of a broken heart that she does not care: to her, this living testament, this book, of Raymundo’s world, is enough.
She insists: It is the world of words that creates the world of things.
But not for us.
We wish to peruse for ourselves Raymundo’s childish Spanish script, his Chabacano escapades, his incidental Visayan locutions, his Latin vulgarity, his schoolboy codes, his English lapses, his Tagalog tricks. Or is it possible that the Translator, the pseudonymous Mimic, has had us in the trap of her infernal arts all along, and history is only a blind alley of her imagination?
I hope not.
530 A student in my course, Psych 401: The Writer on the Couch, has written a thesis, unfortunately full of run-ons so I’m not including it in my bibliography, in which she posits that, in the way that Mark David Chapman, perhaps, would have been incapable of including in his own timeline of universal incidents the death of the first Beatle, Raymundo Mata was not capable of explicitly conjuring the death of the writer whose identity he had embraced.