Why Spanish?

I was at The Podium the other week for the celebration of the centennial of the Mexican Revolution. Ambassador Tomas Javier Calvillo Unna, who is a historian, told me about that defining epoch of Mexico and, once more, I was reminded of what I had been missing all these years  a better understanding, not just of Mexico, but of revolution and our history which I would have had if I’d learned Spanish. This is one of my deepest regrets  I had a lousy teacher in college who, for two years, taught us nothing but conjugation. So I can conjugate verbs properly and read a bit of Spanish, but can’t converse in it.

In the several times that I was in South America and Spain, since all our languages have so many words in Spanish, I got along with my basic needs. Too, so many South Americans and Spaniards know English; but still, so many things escape me. I read Spanish literature in translation but as we all know, “translation is treason.”

Next to Spain, Mexico is important to us historically, because for so many years, we were ruled from Mexico until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which facilitated the trip from Spain to Manila. Camote and tiang-ge are just two things that Mexico left with us.

In 1976, I visited the Emiliano Zapata Ejido in Morelos. I learned from Ambassador Unna that the ejidos, the large farm cooperatives like the communes in China, had been abandoned. The land problem, however, still badgers the country. In the Indian province of Chiapas, neo-Zapatistas rebelled recently because of land hunger.

This is the lasting lesson that the Mexican Revolution brought  which several revolutions all over the world had so confirmed: that land will always be an important determinant of history.

The Mexican Revolution created legendary leaders like Emiliano Zapata; my favorite quote is his exhortation to his men when they flagged: “Men of the North, it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!” Land hunger, which was the basis of that revolution, also produced the Mexican Renaissance.

The painter Jean Charlot, who participated in that revolution with colleagues Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco and David Sequieros, described it in the late ‘60s when we exhibited him at our Solidaridad Galleries. They were charged with making murals to decorate the new and damaged buildings. They emblazoned these buildings with the brooding images of the heroes of that revolution  the common soldiers, the stoic peasants and Indians. The murals were, at first, shunned by Mexicans familiar with the classical visages from the West. But soon enough, these murals were revered and these artists influenced art not just in the whole of South America but even in the United States. Our own Carlos V. Francisco told me he was moved by it.

Bearing their example in mind, how many times have I told our artists  particularly those who started out in Solidaridad  that they will be famous, even rich, but they will not achieve greatness until they have portrayed social protest? In the late ‘60s I published a book about our country’s relationship with Mexico by the Mexican scholar, Rafael Bernal. He was then cultural officer of the Mexican Embassy in Manila. He also assured me that Rizal’s novels in Spanish were splendid examples of Victorian period writing.

Rizal influenced not just Bernal but many South Americans, among them a compassionate and urbane eye specialist  Manuel Puig. He is my firmest personal bridge to that fabulous country.

Dr. Puig has a very successful practice in Los Angeles. Every year, around February, he comes to Manila with his laser equipment to work in the public hospital in Parañaque. He has been doing this for several years now at no expense to the government. Sometimes he comes to Manila with his son and daughter. How did he discover the Philippines? How did this personal philanthropy begin? He found Jose Rizal’s novels in his father’s library when he was young, read them and was moved by them. Like his children. he can recite Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios.”

And finally, that beautiful song, Reloj  I used it in my novel, The Pretenders. For so many years, I thought it was by a Spanish composer until Dr. Puig told me it was a Mexican who wrote it.

I consider my inability to speak Spanish not just a personal loss but a national loss as well. Our ignorance of Spanish denies us a direct knowledge of much of our own past  the 16th, all the way to the 18th century: the history as recorded by the Spanish colonizers themselves and by our own ilustrados who wrote in that language. When I was researching for my novel Viajero, I spent a morning at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. There they were: stacks and stacks of such records in folders bound by string. In the reading room were several researchers poring over those venerable documents in the archaic calligraphy of missionary priests and bureaucrats. How I envied them  our history in their hands!

Records of our past are also in Mexico. And it is not just our past that we are denied. It is the whole culture of a continent and of that storied peninsula, Iberia, I sometimes muse over how Don Quixote must sound and feel in the original language. I wonder how much of its richness, its vitality is lost in translation.

By being unable to know Spanish, I have also denied myself the affluence of the literature of South America. Sure, so many of the indigenous languages of that continent were overwhelmed by Spanish as it has been with us by English, but there is always something of the native culture which lives on, which suffuses the art of these colonized countries. Now, that survival process, which is perhaps similar to ours, can only be surmised but not truly experienced.

To know a language other than ours is always an advantage. More than this, it gives us those perspectives that we are not aware of, which will increase our self-knowledge and, hopefully, give us the wisdom to cope. More so, if we realize that Spanish leads us directly to Latin, and from there, to the Romans, and to the Greeks  the ancient roots of our western culture, its venerable classics. Alas, we did not imbibe these the way most Europeans do, the way the ilustrados did, for, in a sense, they were far better educated than so many of us today. Could this lack explain our shallowness?

We have been so conditioned and constrained by our knowledge of English; those of us who write are overly familiar with much of English literature. How exhilarating  even liberating  if we could read and write in Spanish, too.

A truncated sense of nationalism was responsible for the elimination of Spanish in the college curriculum. This loss is an apt reminder of those hoary caveats about “throwing the baby out with the bath water and cutting off the nose to spite the face.” It should be returned to now, not in college, but in high school. It will not be difficult for students to learn Spanish; as Jose Rodriguez of the Instituto Cervantes said, hundreds of Spanish words are already in our language. As I found out, I could get along with my awful Spanish and if spoken slowly I could even understand a bit.

Some of my books are now translated into Spanish and I am vastly grateful to Maeva my Madrid publisher, who is personally related to Filipinas. But I would have been far happier if I could speak to my readers over there in the beautiful and enduring language of Cervantes.