Dusk: A Novel (Modern Library Paperbacks) (2 page)

Both heroes come from the lower classes. Mabini was lucky
enough to escape his rural origins and come to Manila to study law. He was very bright and morally upright. Aguinaldo, the president of the First Republic, picked him to be his first foreign minister. He was, however, ousted from his position by the wealthy
ilustrados
who surrounded Aguinaldo and betrayed the revolution. According to Ambeth Ocampo, a young, fastidious historian, they concocted a plan to milk the fledgling republic, but Mabini’s ethical and ideological principles foiled them. They spread the gossip that Mabini was a cripple because he was syphilitic, an untruth that I had swallowed and presented as fact in this novel. In 1988, his bones were exhumed and it was discovered that he had had polio. The succeeding editions of
Po-on
bear this correction and my deepest apology.

How do we fight the traitors, the charlatans who use the nationalist guise and pontificate to us in the media?

I learned a lot about Mabini and the revolution from scholars. In 1958 I met historian Cesar Adib Majul shortly after his return from the United States, where he did his Ph.D. dissertation on Apolinario Mabini. When I told him that evening that I am from Rosales, he said that Mabini had stayed in my hometown for a few weeks for a rest cure before he fled to nearby Cuyapo, Nueva Ecija, where he was captured by the Americans.

I had already started writing the Rosales novels and had designed the sequence and the themes. I knew then that I had to use Mabini and his presence in my hometown as the core incident in
Dusk
.

Unfortunately, neither Professor Majul nor the other noted Philippine historian, Teodoro Agoncillo, knew the circumstances of Mabini’s stay in Rosales. I went back to my hometown and tried to dig up records—they were either nonexistent to begin with or had been destroyed or lost. In the town
municipio
and the Catholic church, I couldn’t find a trace of Mabini. I therefore
deduced that he must have stayed with the leading
ilustrado
family at the time, the Pines, because they had the most imposing house.

The story of the Samsons who fled from the Ilokos bears personal meaning for me because I was also writing about my forebears, who came from a town called Cabugaw in Ilokos Sur. They settled in a village in Pangasinan that they named Cabugawan after the town from where they came.

I grew up in this village, listened to the stories of the elders about their flight from the north, the revolution against Spain. My forebears were very nationalistic and deeply religious as well. Most of all, I grew up with the knowledge of their suffering in the new land, their exploitation by the landlords, and the eventual dispossession of their lands. I also knew of the hardiness of their spirit, the dreams they shared, the angers that made them endure.

At the turn of the century, there were still no roads in much of Northern Luzon; there were a few stretches that were cobbled, remains of which may still be seen. Transport was usually on horseback, or on bull carts over rutted trails. The Ilokano carts had solid wooden wheels and were drawn either by bulls (there were many cattle ranches in the grassy foothills of the Cordilleras) or
carabaos
. The carts were covered with buri palm roofing. I saw some of these carts traveling the dirt roads of eastern Pangasinan in the thirties. As in the earlier part of this century, they usually carried Ilokano farmers from the north to eastern Pangasinan to glean the harvested fields or to help in the harvest. Land shortage in the Ilokos was basically responsible for this annual hegira.

The Ilokanos brought with them raw cotton, handwoven cloth, smoking and chewing tobacco, jars of cane wine, sugar, furniture, and in some instances, jewelry. They were prey to
tulisanes
, and this was one reason they traveled in groups.

Sometimes they returned to the Central Plains to settle. They would then usually carry all their worldly goods, the uprooted posts of their houses in the Ilokos, their santos and wooden chests, the weaving looms, all their farm implements and work animals.

These caravans often went all the way to Cagayan Valley, on the Santa Fe Trail (now Dalton Pass). Many of the settlers were not just land hungry; they were also fleeing Spanish tyranny. They were the pioneers who cleared much of eastern Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija, and the Cagayan Valley. These settlers were called the
mal vivir
or the
agraviados
. It should be remembered that as late as 1899, part of the big town of San Carlos, Pangasinan, was still jungle.

The merchants who took to the road, however, were different from the farmers. Most of them were Pangasiñenses, and carried provisions and produce they sold or bartered for grain. These were sugar cakes, sometimes made out of the sap of the buri palm, sweet preserves from pomelo rind,
alamang
(shrimp paste), salted and dried fish, twine, plowshares, bolos. There was much blacksmithing in Pangasinan then.

There was a lot of intermarriage between the Pangasinan traders and their Ilokano customers. The Pangasinan merchants did not come in long caravans; sometimes they came in just two or three bull carts. A merchant with a couple of bull carts would simply park in a village or town square until he was able to dispose of his goods. Much of this traffic was in the dry season, during harvest, and it ended before the rains started in May.

Another group of traders plied the byways of Northern Luzon. They were the Igorots, who came down from the Cordillera and Caraballo ranges to sell rattan baskets. Their presence was announced by the howling of dogs in the neighborhood because they brought with them packs of dogs tied by their necks to rigid bamboo poles so that it would be easier to
manage them. They usually accepted dogs in exchange for their goods. Even then, we knew the dogs would be eaten. In my boyhood, dog meat was not very popular, the way it is today. The Igorots were called Bagos and they were always in G-strings. Seldom were they accompanied by their women.

In re-creating these people I have also tried to illustrate how little the times and the people have changed.

The last chapter is a rendering of the Battle of Tirad Pass. By the time I was ready to write this chapter, I had already read a lot not just on the battle itself but on the Americans and the
insurrectos
they fought. I was, for instance, surprised to see in pictures that most of the Filipino soldiers were barefoot. They were farmers, laborers, just as the enlisted men in our armed forces today come from the lower classes. It was difficult getting exact information on how the soldiers lived, their supplies, their arms. I also decided early in the gestation of the novel to visit Mount Tirad, in the Cordilleras in Northern Luzon. The opportunity came soon enough when I learned that the mother of Ambassador Delia Albert, a friend in our foreign service, lived in the town of Salcedo, which is in the foothills of Mount Tirad.

In the novel, Eustaquio Samson goes to Tirad from Rosales to guide President Aguinaldo and his men through the Cordillera range into the Cagayan Valley. They are pursued by the Texas Rangers. That battle high up in the clouds resembles Thermopylae, how a band of sixty Filipinos—all of them from Bulacan—delayed the American pursuers. In the battle, the boy general Gregorio del Pilar and forty-eight of his men are killed.

I went to Mount Tirad in early January. The time was ideal; the weather was cool—Siberian headwinds in the atmosphere. My wife, Teresita, was with me. Before Candon, a big town in Ilokos Sur, we turned right toward the mountains, on a dirt road that was quite manageable in the beginning but turned tortuous
as we ascended the low hills. It was easy to imagine how horrible it must be to maneuver along the road during the rainy season, when it becomes a rivulet of mud. Mrs. Domingo, Delia’s mother, said she had managed to get the Ministry of Public Works to release some funds to improve the road way back, but when she returned from a long trip, expecting that the road had been repaired, she was surprised to find it was the same, that the money was lost somewhere along the way, perhaps in the pockets of officials either in the Ilokos or in Manila.

We reached Salcedo in about forty-five minutes—a small town, really, apparently untouched by business and pollution. The main street ran through the usual conglomerate of Ilokano homes. Some of the roads had been paved through the efforts of the people themselves. The municipal building was a humble wooden edifice, as was the small market by its side. The town, unlike most Filipino towns, had electricity, and there was running water from the springs that gushed out of the hillsides.

We rented a jeep with which we forded the many turns of the Buaya River; it was the dry season, so the river was shallow. We entered narrow valleys and went up mountain trails until the jeep could go no farther because the ascent was too steep. I am sure that some of the young men we met along the way were members of the New People’s Army, for this part of the Cordilleras was their domain.

We finally reached a settlement at the foot of the trail that led to the pass, and I asked the villagers what they remembered of the battle. There was a very old man who said he was a child then, and all he could recall was the sound of guns.

The trail actually had been widened to allow carts and horses. It was a shortcut from the Ilokos to the Cagayan Valley, and the Spaniards kept it open through the years that the priests preached in the Cordilleras. It was almost noon when my wife
and I stopped climbing. A sedentary city man, I was dizzy from exhaustion. In any case, I already knew what the pass looked like, as I could see it plainly from below where we had stopped.

The first draft took a month to write. I was invited to attend a seminar at the Bellagio Conference Center in northern Italy, and after the conference, I was permitted to stay on to write the novel. Bellagio used to be the property of an Italian nobleman, but the Rockefellers bought it and converted it into a conference center, with quarters for the participants, a beautiful library, and one of the most scenic locales in all Europe. The villa itself sits on a promontory; on one side, to the right, is Lake Leggo, and to the left, the larger Lake Como. I used to take the hydrofoil from the village of Bellagio to Como, and from there, the train to Milan—a two-hour trip.

To reach Bellagio, you take a car from the airport closest to Milan and drive through a scenic route, the road hugging the sides of the mountain, and on the left, through turns and dappled foliage, the shimmering Lake Como. I got to the villa before noon, and there at the entrance was the entire staff lined up—as if I were royalty coming for a visit. Never before had a welcome been as formal and as impressive as this one.

A Japanese friend who had been a guest at the villa asked if I liked wine, and I said, frankly, I did not drink much because of my diabetes, and he said, “Bellagio will be wasted on you because the lunches and the dinners are served with an unending flow of wine!”

It was my first experience of northern Italian cooking, and I got to know more than the pizza and the spaghetti that we in Manila usually consider as Italian food.

It was also the first time I used an electric typewriter; in all the years that I have been writing, I had always used a manual portable. I was assured there would be a typewriter for me, so I
did not bother bringing my old faithful. But they no longer had manual machines, so I had to learn how to use an electric machine. I then realized how much more productive I could be with it, and it is with this assumption that I have now shifted to a computer.

The manuscript was revised eight times and is still undergoing some minor corrections.

In the late sixties and early seventies when I was lecturing in the United States before the committees of the Council on Foreign Relations, I said that if the Americans did not suffer from historical amnesia, they would never have gone to Vietnam. In the Spanish-American War, 250,000 Filipinos (whom the American soldiers called “niggers”)—mostly civilians—were killed, and thousands of Americans—many of them veterans of the Indian campaigns—were also casualties. As in the Philippines, in Vietnam the United States came face-to-face with that indomitable force, Asian nationalism.

The Spanish-American War was objected to vehemently by many Americans, including Mark Twain. On my first visit to the United States, in 1955, I met Robert Frost in Ripton, Vermont. He related how he, too, was against the war, believing that a nation that won its freedom in revolution must not,
cannot
, impose its hegemony on a people waging a revolution for freedom.

I have had all sorts of reactions from readers: one, a scholar, asked me where I got the letter from the priest in the beginning of the novel; he said it read like a historical document. I had to tell him that I wrote it myself, patterned after letters written in the 1880s.

In re-creating Mabini, and endowing the peasant Eustaquio Samson with the habiliments of a hero, what I had intended to show was that nameless thousands of Filipinos then, and now, are capable of epic heroism. All too often, our history is adorned
with heroes of high station; there is nothing written about the common people, the foot soldiers who die in the hundreds so that their generals may live.

In writing this novel, I have also tried to look at our history not with the mind-set of historians and scholars who focus on major events and participants. I have focused instead on the “little people,” to give them a nobler image of themselves.

I will perhaps be accused of being a revisionist, of creating new myths by edifying what is common. I understand only too well how myths become enshrined in a people’s psyche, how Olympian heroes become role models.

But in presenting my hero in Mabini and the peasant Eustaquio Samson, I am presenting an ancient truth that many historians have overlooked.