The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

[Excerpt]
by Gina Apostol

It was a bolt – a thunderbolt. 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! And I
cursed him, the writer – what was his name – for doing what I hadn’t done, for putting my
world 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 was follow in his wake. Even then, I
already felt the bitter envy, the acid retch of the 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 for
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 knuckles where your mouth is. We were loud, obstreperous, heedless. We were
literary critics. We were cantankerous: rude and raving. And no matter on which side you
were, with the crown or with the infidels, Spain or spolarium, all of us, each one, seemed
revitalized by spleen, hatched from the wombs of long, venomous silence. And yes,
suddenly a 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 travelled rapidly in those dark days of its
first printing, now so nostalgically glorious, though then I had no clue that these were
historical acts, the act of reading, or that the book would become 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.