A Natural History of Empire by Dominic Sy

Author:Dominic Sy [Sy, Dominic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Collection, Filipiniana, Short Fiction
Publisher: Ateneo de Manila University Press
Published: 2024-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

The Agonies of Fray Salvador

"Ma-o ra quini ang nabati ug anha nato ma-ila con unsa ang casing-casing sa mga pari nga cachila."

-Vicente Sotto, "Maming"

In the first section of the Agonias, Jesus Christ drops to his knees in the garden of Gethsemane crying, "Audi me, Papa... Audi me..." before bowing his head to the dirt. The question that naturally follows is whether the author of the text had done the same whether that late eighteenth-century friar had also dropped to his knees on the rocks of a Visayan island, asking to be heard by his God.

The two manuscripts to be discussed here were written by Fray Benedicto Salvador, the aforementioned friar, between the years 1784 and 1792. The first of these, the Agonías, is concerned with the agony of Jesus Christ in the garden, and was completed and revised several times before being finally abandoned. The second, concerning John the Baptist, remains partial, fragmentary, and forever incomplete. Both of these Pexts have been criticized as meaningless and infantile, if not dangerous distractions for the contemporary Filipino historian.1 This brief paper seeks to prove the opposite: that these texts, in conjunction with the life of their author, constitute a valuable case of microhistory, a field that in our country's historiography remains remarkably and unfortunately bare.

Fray Benedicto Salvador i Portolà was a man of feeling and of faith, a pre-Romantic in the age of despotism and Enlightenment. He was born in Madrid in 1749 to a Castellan-speaking family with roots in Catalonia. His maternal grandfather, Joan Portolà, had allied himself with the Bourbons in the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1781, after seven years as a novitiate, Salvador was inducted into the Dominican Order and assigned to the Spanish East Indies. Half a year later, he stepped out of the galleon into that salt-worn pier along the coast of Manila. As with every European, Salvador's first encounter with the tropics led to vain attempts at description. He wrote in his journal, almost immediately after arriving: "The rain here is like thunder, the heat impenetrable. The air at noon can suffocate. It is easy to tell who the new arrivals are with their heavy breathing and arrhythmic walking. The mosquitoes seem drawn to our blood-we spend half our time in the streets swatting them away. The older men laugh at us, but they themselves do not seem to have adapted. Not truly. It is easy to spot their foreignness. Only the indios and mestizos move here naturally, so much so that I find I sometimes do not see them at all."

Salvador was assigned to the University of Santo Tomas, under the care of Fray Arturo Villanueva y Corto. In his report to the Dominican Provincial, Villanueva gives the young Salvador "Bonum" for discipline, and "Nil" for intelligence, experience, and prudence. He notes that Salvador-who "has the work ethic of a logician, but none of the skill"-seems to relate to God more from the heart than the mind.2 It is important to remember though

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