The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (58 page)

“What is wrong with the posters, Ka Lucio?” Toto asked.

“You are engaged in propaganda,” he said. “It is just as important as being out there, in the forest. No, I see nothing wrong with the posters—they are well made. Too well made, as a matter of fact. But will they be believed? To whom are you addressing yourselves?”

“They will be believed,” Toto said, “because they speak the truth.”

Ka Lucio shook his head. Though he was sixty-five, there was not a single gray hair on his head, and he did not wear glasses. Everything about him belied years with the Huks, the guerrilla war against the Japanese. He had lost his wife after the war in an ambush and had not remarried. Now, in his eyes, this certitude. “What is truth?” he asked. “This is not a philosophical question. It is a matter of perception. What is the truth that you know about the American bases, Toto?”

“Instruments of American imperialism, the enslavement of the Filipino people,” Toto said quickly, almost by rote.

“They provide jobs for more than twenty thousand Filipinos,” Ka Lucio said. “They bring millions of dollars to this country. Can you do the same, you and your revolution?”

Toto sat back; he knew the answers to such cliché questions—they had been hashed and rehashed in the seminars of the Brotherhood—and he spewed them right out. I knew them, too, but did not believe them.

“Our people do not understand such nationalism, even if it were true. It is more important, Toto,” he said paternally, “that you know how the people think if you want to win them. And slogans will not do it. Do you know what this means if you cannot win the people?”

Toto was getting peeved and was no longer stammering; he began to talk in a shrill, excited squeak.

“The people do not make change, or revolution. They are conservative and they do not know how to think of the future. Look at the people here, in the Barrio. They will go anywhere, wherever they are led.”

Ka Lucio shook his head. “You will learn otherwise, and when you do, it will be too late. The young are discovering politics, they are thrilled by it, they want to do something with it. And it is all very good—oh, if we only had you thirty years ago. What we could have done then!”

“But you did not have us. And you made mistakes,” Toto said.

“Yes, and that is why we lost. But we did not fail. No, by God, we did not fail. We made one step … so that you could make the next. I hope you will make it three.”

Toto sat back, his anger assuaged.

“I hope,” Ka Lucio was continuing, “that you will not waste yourselves.
I sometimes ask myself, what have I done with my life? It is all behind me now. And what have I to show? Twelve years in prison. No, those were not wasted years. I was able to think a lot, the mistakes we made. And more than ever, I got to know what freedom really means. Do you know what freedom is, Pepe? Again, this is not a philosophical question.”

“Free speech,” I said, “free elections, free assembly, free worship.”

Ka Lucio shook his head. He placed his right hand over his breast. “It is here, Pepe,” he said. “This is where it lives. And once it is dead here, no slogan, no demonstration, no ideology, no revolution can ever bring it back to life. And to the people, it is not free speech. It is clothing, food, shelter, medicine for the children when they are ill. Education … not a degree from UP or Ateneo; just the simple kind that will enable them to get jobs.”

We left Ka Lucio reluctantly, Father Jess would be back, and we had to serve him dinner. We knew we would be back, if only so that I could ask how it was during the Japanese Occupation, how they fought, how it was that the Huks were defeated. Ka Lucio had opened a treasure house for me, and I coveted it.

Toto bothered me with his vaulting enthusiasms. He was much brighter than I in history; certainly, he had read a lot of Marx and Marcuse and could cite passages from Sartre and Fanon. I could only recite a few lines from Jarrell, Plath, and Thomas and relate the travel books and novels I had read. Still, I did some reading, too, not just the pamphlets Professor Hortenso prepared or had us distribute, but the esoterica at the library where I often stayed when I had time. Even if my political reading had not increased much, my conclusions were firm. There was something awry about the enthusiasms not just of Toto but of Professor Hortenso, who had a better education than all of us. We should have had more sessions with men like Ka Lucio to learn tactics, organization, and most of all, those irrevocable lessons of their failure.

“What is there to learn except consciousness?” Toto asked. “This is the most important thing. With the new consciousness, our minds are opened and we see the truth at last.”

“That is a lot of messianic shit,” I said.

We were in our favorite
siopao
corner and we had finished our noodles. It was one of those white-washed cubicles with waiters and waitresses in starched white. You lined up at a counter for noodles,
siopao
, and soft drinks, and then took your tray to a white Formica-topped table often soggy with the remnants of the last occupant’s meal; for some reason the noodles always tasted a bit soapy, and they were dry and hard no matter how long they had been immersed in hot soup. But never mind; I was not one to complain, especially since Toto was paying.

“The Huks failed,” Toto said, “because they did not have the support of the masses. They were fish caught without a sea.”

“That is too glib an answer,” I said, “although I will not question it. The important thing is that we should not forget it.”

“We are another generation,” he said stoutly.

“Yes,” I said, “but we do not look back. We are a people with history but we have no sense of the past. And look at our heroes now. The movie stars who cannot act, the politicians who are crooks. We are a people without memory. Why do we rename our streets after politicians who have not done anything for the Filipinos? Why do we allow the Japanese to build monuments for their dead on
our
land—land they had ravaged?”

“I will not forget, I will always remember,” Toto said.

I went back to Ka Lucio. “The Huks lost because they were betrayed.”

“That was in their time,” Toto said stubbornly. “This is 1970; it will not happen again.”

“You are dreaming,” I said. “You are blind to everything around you. Listen, our history is a history of failed revolutions. Always, in the end, someone was bought or someone turned traitor. We are a nation of traitors; we delight in seeing the downfall of others, even friends. We betray for money, for revenge, for envy, but most of the time out of sheer cussedness. So here you are in this organization. You will see me and the others claw our way to the top, over the bodies of our friends. We have the wrong memories. We remember the slightest injury to our pride, our so-called self-respect. We etch these in our hearts and wait patiently for the day when we can stick the knife in the back. But let someone do us a good deed, and we forget it easily. We are also a nation of ingrates.”

He was looking at me, eyes unblinking.

“It was this way before,” I said evenly. “Why should it change? Why shouldn’t history be a continuity? Diego Silang, Apolinario dela Cruz, Andres Bonifacio, Antonio Luna, Gregorio del Pilar—they
were all betrayed. But the worst betrayal is when we betray ourselves for a few pesos. And sometimes we don’t even know it. We are shocked into discovering that we did it, bit by bit, until we had gone over the brink into the cesspool. We can atone for it with knowledge. But how about those who don’t realize it or refuse to do so?”

“I will not betray anyone, and I will not betray myself,” Toto said, his lips quivering. He was beginning to stammer. “All through our history men died for what they believed in. They were not traitors. You named only a few; the brave are more than a handful.”

“But where are they now?” I asked. “It is so easy to have people go another way. The student leaders—they can be bought. If not, all you have to do is please them, their sense of manhood, their being Ilocanos, or Batangueños.”

“That is not true, that is not true!” Toto’s voice pitched.

“The revolution against Spain—the Filipinos were bought at Biak Na Bato. The same with the war against the Americans. And the Japanese. Look around you now. Who are the victors? So then, why should the young be different?”

“Because you are different and I am different!” Toto cried. I could see people turn to our table; he was quickly aware of this, and his voice dropped. I stood up, held his arm, and we walked out; they went back to their noodles and
siopao
, wondering perhaps what it was that made two friends quarrel then stop as quickly as they had started.

Out in Recto, in the sweaty crowd and coagulating heat of afternoon, I tried to tell Toto how necessary it was to retain a certain cynicism, a little distance from those passions that possessed us, but he would not listen. He believed, and you cannot tell someone who believed the sky was dark when to him it was the purest blue. Looking back, I know I could have saved him. But I was being drawn, like the moth, into the flame that had been ignited within us.

Walking home at dusk, taking the small side streets clogged with people and garbage, I would peer at the dimmed insides of houses, the battered furniture of battered living rooms, and wonder about the kind of life these people lived, how far the reality was from the dream. Somehow, with the darkness, the hard lines of faces disappear, the dirt is hidden, and even the filth in corners no longer appears as detestable as it would in the daylight. But darkness or light, I could see them more clearly, their riddle that is the present and
their past that should be destroyed if need be, but forgotten it must be. I see them as I see myself.

Walking home at dusk, I sort out my thoughts, try to understand how it had been, how instinctively I had drifted with the seasons. Who was it who said the bamboo survives the storm because it bends? That is what I know: to say the right things, the correct things that signify my acquiescence, my adulation, so that the wind will not break me. The storm leaves, but I stand—I stand without triumph for I have done what must be done in order to live. Is life really worth all this bending?

There are many others who will not bow, who will question belief, this course, and it is they who believe, too, that the crow will be white some day, that the skies will open up and from there, blessings will pour. They may wait forever, but forever is not time. For them, time has lost its menace. Only tomorrow matters.

Tomorrow then, and my first and biggest demonstration. I was quickly impressed with how an organization, working with a few dedicated members—whatever their purposes—could set up a singular machine for almost anything, to amass crowds of varying allegiances and murky origins, even the young people of the Barrio whose politics is simplified by slogans. We had planned well in the National Directorate. This demonstration was to be our show of strength; we had now aligned ourselves with other student groups—or rather they had joined us, for it was the Brotherhood that had the most chapters, the most radical slogans, articulate orators, best writers.

The delegation from our university was surprisingly large. But they came not because our cause was just but because it meant crowds, excitement, and, most of all, a good excuse not to be in class. It was perilously close to final examinations, but the dean of students granted us permission to assemble, and all classes that afternoon and evening were canceled.

We had fashioned red banners from bolts of cheap cotton and hired two dozen jeepneys, all equipped with sound systems, and these were now on the prowl, gusty with our slogans, urging on the students who had amassed in the side streets, Brotherhood activists marshaling the ranks.

Some had started to sing the Brotherhood songs in Tagalog, the “Internationale” and as Ka Lucio had said, they were as stirring as the Huk songs his comrades sang in their time.

The streets were now empty of traffic, and we had the asphalt to ourselves. Who would stand in the way of thousands of young people united for the first time? We were laughing, pleased at how we had brought ourselves together with so little money and a lot of rhetoric.

Toto was not a marshal; he did not have the build or the voice, and his eyes were bad. He was with me, and his face was aglow with the happiness that communion brought. He even had his arm on my shoulder though he was no taller than I, and it was in this manner that we marched most of the way to Plaza Miranda.

Ah, Plaza Miranda—the throbbing, malodorous heart of Manila! It is here where they all meet, the scavenging politician and his wordbound listener, the government official and his gross hypocrisies, the penitent and his worldly vows. The blooming banners, the shabby buildings loomed around us. It was four, humid and hot, and the crowd was so thick we could barely move. Not all were students—many were the poor with their plastic bags for the market, clerks with cheap vinyl portfolios, vendors in rubber slippers. The Brotherhood had arranged to have a mobile platform—actually a brokerage truck with the sidings removed—backed to the fence of the Quiapo church, and on it were our guest speaker, the aging Senator Reyes, known for his radical nationalist views, as well as orators of the Brotherhood.

All around the plaza were policemen and Metrocom troopers, armed and sullen, but they did not interrupt the meeting. We stationed marshals everywhere who knew what to do. At given signals, they led the chanting:
I-bag-sak. Marcos—Tuta. I-bag-sak!

The marshals also led the clapping at significant pauses of the speakers. I was both fascinated and bothered. How easy it was to channel the energies, the raucous voice of the mob—for that was what we had become, how mindless, how meaningless the clichés, and how foreseeable the response.

Most of us were in blue denims and dark T-shirts, and we knew by experience then that rubber shoes gave us more speed, more comfort on the asphalt and that was where we left many of them the following morning where they were stepped upon and shucked off,
together with the placards that had been ripped, the canisters of tear gas, the shards of broken bottles, and, yes, our blood—smudges of dark red on black, our signature that would describe how high we had vaulted and how we had been dashed back to earth.