The Samsons: Two Novels

AFTERWORD NOTES ON THE WRITING OF A SAGA

I was with the journalists Johnny Gatbonton and Arnold Moss and my wife the other day at the Emerald on Dewey (now Roxas) Boulevard, when we got to reminiscing, marking out our past. We have known each other from way back in our student days at the University of Santo Tomas. They sometimes come to Padre Faura and we talk shop. I told them of a significant decision in my life, made after I had looked carefully into my own being.

It came in 1960, when I was putting my novel The Pretenders into final shape in a village called Marquina, close to the port of Bilbao in the Basque region of Spain.

Rafael Zabala, a young businessman, helped me find cheap lodging in the village which was about half an hour away by car from Bilbao. I met Rafael, or Paeng, as I called him at the Kissinger Seminar at Harvard in 1955 and asked him to help me find a hide-away where I could write. He located a small inn for which I was charged two dollars a day, including meals. I remember my breakfasts — the large pitcher of fresh milk, bread and cheese, and for lunch or dinner, merluza — fish from the Bay of Biscay.

As a journalist, I had closely kept track of our agrarian tensions, the Huk uprising from 1949 to 1953, and much earlier, had researched the Colorum peasant uprising in eastern Pangasinan in 1931. But first, I remembered my own relatives and neighbors in that small barrio where I was born, especially my grandfather, who was a tenant farmer, and how he had participated in the Revolution of 1896. My most memorable moment with that old man was when he took me to the fields beyond our village. It was harvest time, and the fields spread before us, golden with ripening grain. He had carried me on his shoulders, then he had put me down, and with one arm outstretched, he pointed to the near distance, to the land he had claimed from the forest together with his brothers, and spoke of how the land was stolen by the rich ilustrados with their new-fangled torrens titles. I remember most of all his crumpled face, the tears streaming down his cheeks, and his admonition: I should study, be literate so that I would not be oppressed.

Working in journalism in the fifties, I sought out Pedro Calosa, who led the Colorum uprising in eastern Pangasinan. Earlier, in 1948, I was drawn to the Huks and met their leader, Luis Taruc, when he came down from the mountains and stayed briefly at the old Quirino house in Dewey Boulevard. I was then on the staff of the Catholic weekly The Commonweal. Both had impressed upon me the immensity of the struggle for agrarian justice.

Now, here I was in the Basque, putting together my first novel, The Pretenders. I had included in it an old rebel, the father of protagonist Antonio Samson, who was in prison for being a member of the Colorum movement, and had burned the municipio of the fictional town of Rosales (Tayug).

There, far from the Philippines, I thought about the continuing poverty of our peasantry, which I knew firsthand.

In that month in Marquina, I often walked beyond the village to the hillside farms. My afternoons were punctuated by what seemed like the crack of pistol shots. The boys were playing pelota, the traditional Basque game that we in Manila call jai-alai. One day, a pelotari who had played at the fronton in Manila came in his big Ford — the only Ford in the entire region — and he drove me around the beautiful Basque country, and reminisced about the Philippines, and he made me homesick. I went to the posh resort town of San Sebastian. It was June and pleasant, and for a couple of nights I slept on the beach, the Playa dela Concha, the surf murmuring softly through the night, the laughter of vacationers lolling on the sand reaching out to me, dismembered voices from another world. I also ventured into Guernica, remembering Picasso’s famous painting about the doomed town that was leveled by Hitler’s planes during the Spanish Civil War.

In these meanderings I brought to mind our own revolution, its betrayal, and the continuing oppression of the Filipino masses, not so much more recently by the colonialists, but by our own mestizo elites. How did we get to be so miserable, so downtrodden? I recalled my grandfather, his careworn face, and slowly — ever so slowly — I came to realize how necessary it was for us to rebel, to overthrow the status quo, the exploiters who claimed they were Filipinos.

I had been taught to believe in the sanctity of democracy, in the use of reason, and the evil that is violence. I had read voraciously Das Kapital in college, and was very much impressed by it although I found it difficult reading. But it was not Marxism that made me abandon the idea of peaceful change. It was my knowledge of the poverty in that barrio where I came from and how it was almost impossible for people like us to rise from the dungheap of internal colonialism.

It was in that Basque village where I finally and irrevocably accepted revolution. The moment I did, I immediately felt a gladsome lifting of the spirit, as if freed from a damning burden that had weighted me down all my life.

So the main character in The Pretenders, Antonio Samson, kills himself. Betrayed, corrupted, his death is for him a measure of redemption.

Where do you get your ideas? What inspires you? These are common enough questions often asked by readers. The imagination, of course, always helps, but the truth is that I write from my own inconsequential life. Like most egoists, I had thought of doing my autobiography but had desisted, for I know that in every story I wrote, I was in it not so much as a peacockish character, but as the fount of most of those thoughts, feelings, and the minutiae of detail and incident, I hope, that gives my fiction some semblance of throbbing reality.

For example, there is my past — our past. In conceptualizing the five-novel Rosales saga in the early fifties, I had planned on writing only four. I had not intended it to cover a hundred years of our history — perhaps, at the most, just three generations.

During the Liberation in 1945, when I was briefly in the American Army as a civilian technician, I read those free paperback editions that GIs casually threw away, among them the novels of William Faulkner. The literary geography that Faulkner created fascinated me, and I decided to try doing the same, that is, using those vivid memories of my boyhood and of my village. Too poor to buy a typewriter in those days, when my colleagues in the Manila Times left the office, I used to stay there and work till past midnight, writing the chapters first as short stories so that I could sell them to the weekly magazines to augment my income. As a friend, Austin Coates, said when we talked about my working habits, even if I was good at carpentry, the joints would show. And also: I should not write like this but try to get away from it all so that I could concentrate on my fiction.

Very sound advice, which I valued. Since then, I have tried writing away from my own country. The Rosales novels were mostly written abroad, with the exception of Tree, which I wrote in Baguio, in a modest hotel, Vallejo Inn, below the old Pines Hotel which had burned down. Vallejo, built before World War II, was for clerks, and the Pines was for the brass. I wrote The Pretenders in a small village in the Basque country, Mass in Paris, and the last to be finished, Poon, in Bellagio, Italy. My favorite writing escape is Tokyo. As everyone knows, Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities in the world, but I am very fortunate to know Gaston Petit, a French-Canadian Dominican and a superb artist. His atelier is in Shibuya, just behind the Dominican church. He allows me to stay in the monastery and in his atelier. Half of the year, during the summer months, Father Petit hastens to Champlain in Canada, but when the harsh Canadian winter sets in, he returns to Japan. If his atelier, which I call the Petit Hilton, is not available, Professor Yasushi Kikuchi of Waseda, another old friend, tries to locate inexpensive lodging in his university for me.

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.

I had meant the title Mass to represent the Catholic mass, and the masa, as in EDSA in 1986. The offertory, the sacrifice — it’s all there, and so is the masa that should usher our salvation. But, as we can see in the top officials, we had elected our damnation.

Come to think of it, on occasion I miss Marcos; he was there, the epitome of greed and moral depravity. It was so easy to mark him as the enemy who gave us — who despised him — a cause, a reason for being and unity. And listen now to the shameless arrogance of his widow and children. How could we welcome them back?

One thing is sure: Marcos defined with unerring clarity the shattered Filipino intellectual community. He clearly demarcated the line between those who pandered to him, served him, and oppressed their fellow writers, and those who remained steadfast in their integrity. Today, many of those who toadied to him are back in power, befouling media and gloating at having returned like worms that have surfaced from the woodwork. No one among them has come out to say contritely, “mea culpa, maxima mea culpa”—no, they swagger instead like untarnished paragons. This is what ails us all — we do not ostracize them, we do not punish them; we anoint these vermin instead.

How I envy some of my characters, Tia Nena and Ka Lucio in Mass, whom I re-created from Rizal’s Sisa and Cabesang Tales, the young and old who acted with great fortitude and courage, who did not compromise as I have done. So here I am on the fringes and yet very much a part of this rotten structure I want to destroy, chained as I am to it by comfort and human frailty.

In writing my novels, I had dreamed of giving my countrymen memory, an iron sense of our heroic past that would exalt and ennoble us so that even in our poverty we could somehow hold our heads high, remembering that greatest of all Filipino writers — Rizal — who was my inspiration.

Forty years ago, in that village in the Basque country where I wrote the first novel in the Rosales saga, memory and my conscience compelled me to accept revolution; with it I also chose the pen as the instrument to help bring justice to my unhappy country.

Every so often, I bring writer friends and some of my students to that barrio where I was born. I show them the creek where as a boy I had swum, the fields where I had helped in the harvest, and my few surviving childhood friends — how shriveled and defeated they look. Through the years, I have seen my barrio become a rural slum. And so, looking around me, at the debris of our youthful dreams, the old man that I have become knows now the futility of words.