The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (81 page)

My own generation was matured by World War II. In those three years that we were brutalized by the Japanese, we were deprived and
hungry, we suffered torture and feared for our lives. War tempered and at the same time ravaged us. When we returned to school in 1945, we were fired with idealism, as young people often are. We aspired to build a free and prosperous nation. Then, through the two decades after college, I saw many of my contemporaries forsake our idealism and our consciences. I found an apt symbol for such an apostasy—the balete tree (
ficus benjamina linn
)—also known as the strangler tree. It starts as a sapling encircled by vines that fatten and eventually become the trunk of the tree itself. In their growth, they choke the young tree they have embraced. It is with such a pervasive sense of futility that I wrote
Tree
, then
My Brother, My Executioner
about the peasant Huk uprising in the early fifties. At that time, at the height of the Hukbalahap (short for Army of the Nation against the Japanese) uprising, the American writer Wallace Stegner visited the Philippines. I attended one of his lectures. Having read the fiction of the period, he said that Filipino writers were not engaged—or
engagée
as the French would call it; he had not seen anything written about that rebellion that had already cost so many lives.

A word about that peasant war. After the American liberation in 1945, the landlords who had fled during the Occupation returned to their haciendas with the blessings of the Americans and the government. The landlords demonized the peasant Huk movement as Communist and began maltreating their tenants as before—the same tenants who had joined the guerrillas fighting the Japanese. Stegner was, of course, correct: there was hardly any literature written on that period. The most moving was not fiction; it was a memoir written by the American Communist William J. Pomeroy, who had joined the Huks. It was this internecine conflict that forms the core of
My Brother, My Executioner
. Don Vicente, the landlord, who appears but briefly in
Tree
, dominates this novel. Finally, I did
The Pretenders
, which ends bleakly in the suicide of the protagonist, Antonio Samson. I intended the novel to end the saga on this note of despair.

Someone asked why. Was death the only solution to our moral conundrum? I intended Samson’s demise, however, to be not just a physical death, but also a metaphor: in a revolution, the rotten structure has to be destroyed before reconstruction takes place.

Then in 1972 Marcos declared martial law and some of my contemporaries became his eager acolytes. It was then, too, that so
many young people opposed Marcos and took up arms against the dictator and his minions. A glimmer of hope. I started to rethink the suicide of Tony Samson.

There was one young man, Emmanuel Lacaba, to whom I dedicated the latest edition of
Mass
. Eman used to come to my bookshop and we had several quiet talks. He was an excellent poet, like his older brother, Jose, and I published some of his poetry in my journal,
Solidarity
. He was very serious and I did not realize how passionately he felt about the rot afflicting our country. He disappeared, and months later I learned that as a cadre of the revolutionary movement, he had died in Mindanao.

Eman’s death was tragic, but an even greater tragedy that has escaped most of us is the death of hundreds of our soldiers, fighting for the same cause—Filipinas. Like the cadres of the revolutionary movement, these soldiers come from the lower classes and are in the army for the simple lack of better alternatives. When can we ever resolve this horrible contradiction and promise a better future for all our young?

I was somehow heartened by the sacrifice Eman and the youth of his generation made. I also realized that they were sorely divided. The more radical fell under the influence of Communism. Although I believe in the necessity of a revolution, its righteousness and perhaps inevitability, I had hoped for a nationalist uprising, not Maoist-inspired. There is so much, after all, in our revolutionary tradition and in the writings of our own heroes of the ambrosial ideas to sustain the young.

I am not and cannot be self-righteous in my assessment of the intellectual subservience under Marcos. Many had refused to sign the appeal that I drafted in 1974, pleading with Marcos to release the writers in prison. Some of those who refused to sign were simply frightened; like most writers, they did not have an economic or social base. They depended on their government jobs and could easily be dismissed by the dictator. I understood this only too well—but what about those who had money? I recalled Virginia Woolf, who said, “Only those with independent means can have independent views.” I did not persist with those who refused to sign the appeal.

I couldn’t leave after Marcos declared martial law. I received many invitations to go abroad for conferences, writers meetings, and cultural festivals, but the military did not permit me.

After four years of not being allowed to travel, I finally concocted a plan. Having been interested in agrarian reform, I had supported Marcos’s land reform program, particularly the first two years of it, when he outlawed tenancy in the rice and corn lands. No president had ever done this. Not even Magsaysay with his vaulting popularity could push such legislation through a landlord-dominated Congress.

An American friend, Robert Tilman, who was a college dean in North Carolina, came to Manila, and I asked him to invite me to a nonexistent conference on agrarian reform in the United States. I was to speak on the Marcos land reform decree, which I wholeheartedly supported. I showed the letter to the press secretary, Francisco Tatad, who endorsed it to the Department of Foreign Affairs. I had known the acting secretary of foreign affairs, Manuel Collantes. It was at his office where I found out why I couldn’t leave. A former colleague in journalism, who was then executive secretary, had put me on the black list. I listened to their conversation when Secretary Collantes said he was taking me off the black list on his responsibility.

With my passport back, I went to Paris to attend a cultural conference, after which I decided to stay on for a month to write. I have done my best writing away from the tension and hassle in Manila—in Japan particularly, as noted, where I have enough distance from Manila but am near enough to rush back if necessary. To do the fifth novel in the saga was a compulsion I couldn’t ignore, to pay homage to the courageous young people, like Eman Lacaba, who defied Marcos. Antonio Samson had an illegitimate son, Pepe, in
The Pretenders
. I made Pepe the redeemer in
Mass
, the concluding novel in the saga.

Nena Saguil, the painter who had lived most of her years in Paris, found me lodging at the Rue de Echaude, a hundred meters from the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the Left Bank—seven dollars a day—no one would believe it: a tiny, spartan room, without bath, but with a washbowl, a small writing table, and a cot. Close by was the café Deux Maggots, which writers like Hemingway frequented; Jean-Paul Sartre also lived in the area.

I had little money from my small publishing cum bookshop business, which had suffered during the martial law regime.

A public market was below on the sidewalk. For the whole
month of June, I subsisted on bread and apricots, which were in season, till my stomach was sour.

I had never worked as frenziedly as I did then.
Mass
is the only novel I wrote from the beginning to the end in a month of creative spurt. I had to transfer three times from the rooms I occupied: I was disturbing the neighbors. The concierge was very understanding and finally found a corner room on the top floor so that even if I was typing the whole night with my old portable, I would not bother anyone.

When tired, I walked to the Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés, idled on the sidewalk benches, and watched the girls in midsummer shorts. Sometimes I crossed the Seine to the Notre Dame cathedral and looked at the tourists.

Returning to Manila, I polished the novel in four or five drafts, after which I went to New Day. Publisher Gloria Rodriguez, who had included me on her list earlier, read the manuscript and was enthralled by it but flatly told me she couldn’t use it: Marcos was mentioned in the novel by name, and she feared the consequences if it came out under her imprint.

I went next to Eggie Apostol, a college classmate and
comadre
. She was putting out
Mr. & Ms.
, a weekly magazine that, even then, was already courageously critical of Marcos. She, too, demurred. There being no publisher, and penniless as I was, I had
Mass
mimeographed and distributed to a few friends as a kind of samizdat.

Somehow, my Dutch publisher, Sjef Theunis, heard about the manuscript and asked to see it. I sent it immediately, and it turned out to be one of those flukes: it first appeared in Dutch. I asked Sjef if he might advance my royalty so I could publish it in the Philippines. With that money, I immediately put it out under my Solidaridad imprint.

Friends were apprehensive. I had been harassed by the Marcos gangsters, but the harassment was nothing compared to what had happened to the others who opposed him, those who were tortured and killed by his thugs. Now, they were specific: Colonel Abadilla, the dreaded hatchetman of the dictator, would get me.

But I knew Marcos was deliberate. In 1965, during the presidential campaign, the Macapagal government banned a movie on Marcos’s life and it drew much attention instead.

At the onset of martial law in 1972, he threw Senators Jose W.
Diokno and Ninoy Aquino into prison. After two years, however, he released Diokno but kept Ninoy Aquino in jail. I asked Jose Diokno why he was released. Diokno explained: he was not in a position to really harm Marcos. He could range the world, making speeches condemning Marcos, but the dictator would still remain in power because Diokno did not have the political machine and the following to overthrow him. Ninoy did. Furthermore, Diokno did not aspire to the presidency. Why, then, should he languish in jail?

If Marcos stopped me, he would only draw attention to the book. It must be remembered that he censored newspapers and movies, but he did not censor the stage. I also knew that he believed Filipinos by and large did not read novels.

Years afterward, Alex, my son, who is an executive chef in California, told me that the apricot is the best brain food ever, which perhaps explains why
Mass
sold so well, even in Holland, where it came out in two editions. Since then,
Mass
has become my most translated novel and the one most commented on. A young Dutch teacher came to Manila only because he had read
Mass
. The novel, he said, evoked a vivid sense of place; he asked to see the setting, so I took him to Forbes Park, Manila’s ritziest district, then to the massive slum of Tondo, and finally to a sleazy massage parlor in Quezon City.

Another reaction was from a myopic academic who prided himself on being Tondo-born. He dismissed
Mass
as inaccurate, saying that I did not know Tondo. How could I explain that I had known Tondo since before World War II, when I used to visit relatives there? Besides, I had also lived in a poor section in Manila, near Antipolo street in Santa Cruz.

In the late sixties, a nongovernment cooperative, SAKAP, was conceived in my bookshop by Fr. Francis Senden, Angelita Ganzon, Ramon Echevarria, former Justice Jose Feria, Jose Apostol, Tony Enchausti, and several other middle-class do-gooders. SAKAP was to work in the slums and train out-of-school youths for jobs. I elected to work in Barrio Magsaysay in Tondo where I made acquaintances through an American Peace Corps volunteer, Walter Turner. I set up a bindery shop in the slum, enlisting jobless out-of-school young people there as apprentice bookbinders. I got obsolescent equipment from printer friends, like the late Alberto Benipayo, then visited the university and college libraries soliciting bookbinding jobs. I supervised the bindery, working with the Barrio Magsaysay youth and getting
to know their families. I even got the services through UNESCO of an Italian binder who worked for a while in the project. At the height of its operation it employed some twenty youths. When I had time, I showed them the sights, from my van. In Makati, at a supermarket, they found the goods there cheaper than in the stores in the Barrio. They were all so awed by the magnificence of the Manila Hotel when I took them there for
merienda
. Why was I doing so much for them? some wondered. Was I going to run for city councillor or for Congressman of the district? If I wanted votes, why did I scold them severely on occasion? Unfortunately, I soon found out that I was giving too much time to the project and neglecting my writing and my little bookshop. I started to withdraw and slowly the project fell apart. They couldn’t manage it themselves—the accounting, the quality control, the collections. I asked the experts what had happened, why such a good project, backed up by the best of intentions, did not succeed. It was explained to me simply. Not only did those I left behind have no real training in management—the members of the cooperative, for that was what I intended it to be—they had no real stake, no money in it, to demand their scrutiny and loyalty. It was a stern lesson I will never forget. But with writers, no experience is ever wasted. It is all stored in the mind to be retrieved afterward. That is how I used my intimate Barrio Magsaysay slum background in
Mass
.

Some six years ago, on the occasion of the publication of a collection of my short fiction in Paris, my wife and I visited my old haunt, this time with the help of Philippe Cardenal and a generous grant from the French government. We stayed at the posh Hotel Madison across the boulevard from the church of Saint-Germaindes-Prés. With my translator, Amina Said, and her editor-husband, Ghislain Ripault, my Criterion publisher, Genevieve Perrin, and Quai d’Orsay guide Domnica Melone, we dined in fine watering holes. I revisited my old hotel, the public market below it, and was warmed with nostalgia for that June in 1976 when I wrote
Mass
and subsisted on bread and apricots. I worried that whatever I wrote would not equal
Mass
in its passionate intensity, not having a single bite of that precious fruit on this trip.