The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata
(Excerpt)
By Gina Apostol
It was a bolt – a thunder bolt. A rain of bricks, a lightning zap. A pummeling of mountains, a
heaving violent storm at sea – a whiplash. A typhoon. An earthquake. The end of the world. And
I was in ruins. It struck me dumb. It changed my life and the world was new when I was done.
And when I raised myself from bed two days later, I thought: It’s only a novel. If I ever met him,
what would my life be? I lay back in bed. But what a novel! And I cursed him, the writer – what
was his name – for doing what I hadn’t done, for putting my worlds into words before I even had
the sense to know what the world was. That was his triumph – he’d laid out a trail, and all we
had to do is follow his wake. Even then, I already felt the bitter envy, the acid retch of a
latecomer artist, the one who will always be under the influence, by mere chronology always
slightly suspect, a borrower, never lender be. After him, all Filipinos are tardy ingrates. What is
the definition of art? Art is reproach to those who receive it. That was his curse upon all of us. I
was weak, as if drugged. I realized: I hadn’t eaten in two days. Then I got out of bed and boiled
barako for me.
Later it was all the rage in the coffee shops, in the bazaars of Binondo. People did not even hide
it – crowds of men, and not just students, not just boys, some women even, with their violent
fans – gesticulating in public, throwing up their hands, putting up fists in debate. Put your
knuckle where your mouth is. We were loud, obstreperous, heedless. We were literary critics.
We were cantankerous: rude raving. And no matter which side you were, with the crown or with
the infidels, Spain or Spolarium, all of us, each one, seemed revitalized by spleen, hatched by
the woods of long, venomous silence. And yes, suddenly the world opened up to me, after the
novel, to which before I had been blind.
***
Still I rushed into other debates, for instance with Benigno and Agapito, who had now moved
into my rooms. Remembering Father Gaspar’s cryptic injunction - “throw it away to someone
else,” so that in this manner the book traveled rapidly in those dark days of its printing, now so
nostalgically glorious, though then I had no clue that these were historic acts, the act of reading,
or that the book would be such a collector’s item, or otherwise I would have wrapped it in
parchment and sealed it for the highest bidder, what the hell, I only knew holding the book could
very likely constitute a glorious crime – in short, I lent it to Benigno.