I worked on Retana's biography of Rizal throughout the crisis of the end of my marriage and the succeeding years, four in all. I just translated it without thinking what I would do, because it was so absorbing. I can't explain what it was like to listen to a man, long dead, speaking so freely, having a temper tantrum over the stupidity of the Spanish government for executing Rizal. I wept when he described Rizal's final days in Fort Santiago, the farewells from his mother (his father didn't go) and sisters, the marriage to Josefina, the final walk to Bagumbayan, his normal pulse seconds before being shot. In Spanish.
You see, there is something so superficial about English, so removed from emotion, unless it describes events that happened in English. Does this make sense? Anyway, Retana's biography was never translated into English. You can imagine why. It is a literary work in 19th century cultured Spanish. I had to scramble to understand many turns of phrase that were archaic, and the language of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan Spaniard like Retana. It ate up many hours and kept me out of trouble. Ten years later, when I had gotten together the entire book, I translated the complete work, in another difficult time when I re-exiled myself, back to the U.S.
I promised Rizal I would publish my partial translation (Retana too). I started complaining on Internet about the shameful cold shouldering of Retana, when he had made such a humongous contribution to Filipino history. Today things are different. There's plenty of information on him now. Academics and others have cited him in new works. I feel satisfied, pleased. Good. Very good.
Then after I came back from Ilocos Norte in 1991, I promised my Lolo Emilio I would publish my account of his life. And I did, in 2006. The Rizal Retana book made waves. I got invaluable support from then-Consul General in Chile, Virgilio Reyes, to present it here in the Philippine Embassy in Santiago, and then to get books to Manila, and to present it in Instituto Cervantes. I was also able to sell copies in San Francisco and Los Angeles. My Lolo's book was a different story. I only published 300 copies and gave them all away. The publishing house in Santiago treated me with absolute disdain, charged me hefty and printed on inferior quality paper. I gave back several because the print was not even clearly legible. I had given them a book that was ready for press. The Spanish Cultural Center was ready to hold the launch. My publisher ignored my requests for logistical support. I canceled.
You see, I am nobody in Chile. Absolutely a nobody. I have no institutional backing. Even the Embassy ignores me. I walked out on an event in Universidad de Santiago last August. I thought it would be an exhibit of Filipino products and it turned out to be a homage to Rizal. The acting ambassador gave a talk that was so boring, in English, with an interpreter who did her best and was clearly somebody's friend, she was not professional (I could have done it as a volunteer!). There were a lot of people there, students. And they got a horrendously dull clichéd talk, followed by a tourism video, with background music of some black U.S. pop singer and the usual FILIPINAS FOR SALE, GET YER ASSES OVER HERE AND HAVE A GREAT TIME!!!
I walked out, it was too awful.
I had not gone to any Embassy events since 1999 because I was repelled by the falsity of it. The boringness...it was what drove me away from my Mother, looking for somewhere -- I thought it was in an English-speaking country -- where I would cease to be bored.
After a few years in the U.S. -- and keep in mind, I was in a microculture of a movement that was a lot of fun, also a lot of work, but it was not the ordinary U.S. lifestyle by any means -- I was also ready for a break. So I came to Chile and it took me six years to realize what the hell was going on.
And by then I had become inured to giving up my U.S. residence, to renouncing the music I loved, to adjusting to this difficult society. The movement in the U.S. was a lot more fun than the movement in Chile. Class differences, race biases and prejudice, economic exploitation of the defenseless (that's including people like me -- you are only defended here if you are a successful entrepreneur or belong to a clan or family of racketeers, whatever the racket is, especially political and multinational)...I hated this place. I raised my two children complaining about how much I hated it here. And this place hated me back. It happens, you know. What you put out there, is what you get back, amplified in your benefit, or for your supreme bad luck.
Then the marriage breakup, then the dramas (very well camouflaged so that the children would not suffer through World War III), and one day in 2002 when I realized I had to take refuge. So back to my mother in California, to rest.
But before that, I was able to travel to Manila in 1997, 1999 and 2000. Looking for a publisher for the Retana bio, basically, relating to my country in a totally different way. It was tremendously difficult and challenging. It was magic. Even when I was in a passenger boat on the Pasig, I felt I could sense or see what it was like 150 years ago. I had learned this in Chile. I had learned that you can talk to places, that you can sense places with a long history. Chile's revolutionary struggle had woken my mind up to the incredible drama, and I am a drama hog, a drama queen. I need it!!!!
I cannot stand "agua perra" (dog water -- a Chilean expression synonymous to another Chilean expression, "ni chicha ni limonada" -- neither apple cider nor lemonade, meaning insipid, neither this nor that), ...no wonderful English expression comes to mind though I'm sure there is one. Why waste your time and the other person's pretending to talk, pretending to relate, pretending to live?
The Army of Liberation led by the Argentine General José de San Martín, who crossed the Andes with Chilean General Bernardo O'Higgins (the bastard son of Ambrose O'Higgins, an Irish engineer who was made a Viceroy of Perú by the Spanish and who never acknowledged his son though he did educate him in London, where one of his tutors was the ideologue of the Latin American Wars of Independence, Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda). They crossed the bloody Andes with soldiers, horses, mules, cannon!!!! Negro slaves, and of course peasants. Even a French general who had served under Napoleon!!!! And a Spanish priest who was an expert in munitions and ordnance who figured out how to get cannon across the Andes with a system of pulleys. Epic, epic, epic.
And of course, they had camp followers -- women to wash and cook and sew and, you can bet, comfort.
I actually summarized all this (it was very difficult, but oh so fascinating) in a manuscript never published entitled Through the Lens of Latin America: A comparative vision of the Philippine Colonial Experience. The then-Director of the Instituto Cervantes Library, Santiago Díaz-Jove Blanco kindly accepted my manuscript and included it in the library as a reference material.
It's a kind of time travel. I returned to Filipinas (I prefer Filipinas to "Philippines") in 1991 and in Vigan, in Padre Burgos' family home, taking in the countryside, the small towns, old houses and the Cathedrals, I became utterly enthralled. And yes, they all spoke to me, the places, the ruins, the churches, the cemeteries, the houses. What had been mute all my adolescence (when I was a child in Cebú I did feel communion, but a child is a child, unconscious, immersed in magic as though it were not. Filing it away for later).
Actually, in my teenage years I did feel things, the few times I was in the country. But it was like, "Oh, how beautiful my land is." And my classmate said, Ay Beth, you're so mo-ran-tic.
It's different when you are in the Spanish world. That world is SERIOUS. It is drenched with soul and feels no embarrasment. It is what happened to me when I read Don Quijote de La Mancha. Again, the archaic Spanish. The laughter!!! Oh, what a FUNNY book!! And you know what, it is FILIPINO HUMOR. Right to the part where don Quijote farts in his saddle. Or where the pretty boys acting the parts of ladies show their hairy legs accidentally. I love Don Quijote. I would NEVER read it in English. Never, never, never.
I would teach it in Spanish even if it took us 20 years.
We would laugh and cry so much, it would be worth it.
And all of this, was in Rizal's world. In the world of all our past that we were forced to give up.
Yet it is here, across the Pacific. And by God, the Andes will never allow the British or the French or the North Americans to cart them away and force the Latin Amerindian peoples to give up their Spanish.
Yes, the Andes gave Spanish back to me. I was able to return to my homeland and recognize the wellsprings of my Filipino soul. Not the Spanish mestizos and the social climbers -- they don't have the Hispanic Filipino soul, they prefer their privilege and their secrets. They like Miami Beach. Latin America is too far away. Ay no, ang layo!!! Okay, Madrid. Let's go shopping in El Corte Inglés, let's spend the summer in Marbella with the celebrities.
Sí, yo hablo español. In Tagalo too, of course. And as a child I spoke Bisaya.
Yeah, I'm Filipina through and through........you can take the Filipina out of Filipinas, but you'll never take Filipinas out of her. Especially once she can read Don Quijote de la Mancha en castellano.
Hasta la próxima,
Isabel de Ilocos
Bernardo O'Higgins
José de San Martín
Francisco de Miranda
The crossing of the Andes
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